Late in 1612, on a cold December morning, a young man, very lightly dressed, was pacing up and down past the door of a house in the Rue des Grandes Augustins, in Paris. Having walked so much, like an indecisive lover who does not dare to appear before the first beloved in his life, no matter how accessible she may be, the young man finally stepped over the threshold of the door and asked if the master Francois Porbus was in. Having received an affirmative answer from the old woman who was sweeping the canopy, the young man began to slowly rise, stopping at each step, just like a new courtier, preoccupied with the thought of what kind of reception the king would give him. Climbing up the spiral staircase, the young man stood on the landing, still not daring to touch the fancy hammer that adorned the door of the workshop, where, probably, the painter of Henry IV, forgotten by Marie Medici for the sake of Rubens, was working at that hour. The young man experienced that strong feeling that must have made the hearts of great artists beat when, full of youthful fervor and love for art, they approached a man of genius or a great work. In human feelings there is a time for the first flowering, generated by noble impulses, gradually weakening, when happiness becomes only a memory, and glory a lie. Among the short-lived agitations of the heart, nothing resembles love so much as the young passion of the artist, who tastes the first wonderful torments on the path of glory and misfortune - a passion full of courage and timidity, vague faith and inevitable disappointments. The one who, during the years of lack of money and the first creative ideas, did not feel trepidation when meeting a great master, will always lack one string in his soul, some kind of brush stroke, some kind of feeling in creativity, some elusive poetic shade. Some self-satisfied braggarts, who too soon believed in their future, seem smart people only to fools. In this respect, everything spoke in favor of the unknown young man, if talent is measured by those manifestations of initial timidity, by that inexplicable shyness that people created for fame easily lose when constantly revolving in the field of art, just as beautiful women lose their timidity by constantly practicing coquetry. . The habit of success drowns out doubts, and modesty is, perhaps, one of the types of doubt.
Dejected by need and surprised at this moment by his own audacity, the poor newcomer would not have dared to enter the artist, to whom we owe a beautiful portrait of Henry IV, if an unexpected opportunity had not come to the rescue. An old man came up the stairs. From his strange costume, from his magnificent lace collar, from his important, confident gait, the young man guessed that this was either a patron or a friend of the master, and, taking a step back to make way for him, he began to examine him with curiosity, in the hope of finding in him the kindness of an artist or the kindness characteristic of art lovers - but in the face of the old man there was something diabolical and something else elusive, peculiar, so attractive to the artist. Imagine a high, prominent, receding forehead hanging over a small, flat, upturned nose, like that of Rabelais or Socrates; lips mocking and wrinkled; short, haughtily raised chin; gray pointed beard; green, the color of sea water, eyes that seemed faded with age, but, judging by the mother-of-pearl tints of protein, were still sometimes capable of throwing a magnetic glance in a moment of anger or delight. However, this face seemed faded not so much from old age, but from those thoughts that wear out both soul and body. Eyelashes had already fallen out, and sparse hairs were barely noticeable on the superciliary arches. Place this head against a frail and weak body, frame it with lace, shining white and striking in the fineness of the workmanship, throw a heavy gold chain over the old man's black coat, and you will get an imperfect image of this person, to whom the weak lighting of the stairs gave a fantastic shade. You would say that this is a Rembrandt portrait, leaving its frame and silently moving in the semi-darkness, so beloved by the great artist. The old man cast a penetrating glance at the young man, knocked three times, and said to a sickly man of about forty who opened the door:
Good afternoon, master.
Porbus bowed politely; he let the young man in, believing that he had come with the old man, and no longer paid any attention to him, especially since the newcomer froze in admiration, like all born artists who first got into the studio, where they can peep some of the techniques of art. An open window pierced in the vault illuminated Master Porbus's room. The light was concentrated on an easel with a canvas attached to it, where only three or four white strokes were laid, and did not reach the corners of this vast room, in which darkness reigned; but whimsical reflections either lit in the brown semi-darkness silvery sparkles on the bulges of the Reitar cuirass hanging on the wall, or they outlined in a sharp stripe the polished carved cornice of an ancient cabinet lined with rare crockery, then dotted with shiny dots the pimply surface of some old curtains of gold brocade, picked up by large folds, which probably served as nature for some picture.
Plaster casts of naked muscles, fragments and torsos of ancient goddesses, lovingly polished by the kisses of centuries, cluttered shelves and consoles. Countless sketches, sketches made with three pencils, sanguine or pen, covered the walls up to the ceiling. Drawers of paints, bottles of oils and essences, overturned benches left only a narrow passage to get to the high window; the light from it fell directly on the pale face of Porbus and on the bare, ivory-colored skull of a strange man. The attention of the young man was absorbed by only one picture, already famous even in those troubled, troubled times, so that stubborn people came to see it, to whom we owe the preservation of the sacred fire in the days of timelessness. This beautiful page of art depicted Mary of Egypt intending to pay for the crossing in a boat. The masterpiece intended for Marie de Medici was subsequently sold by her in her days of need.
I like your saint, - said the old man to Porbus, - I would pay you ten golden crowns in addition to what the queen gives, but try to compete with her ... damn it!
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Stories -
Honore de Balzac
Unknown masterpiece
I. Gillette
Late in 1612, on a cold December morning, a young man, very lightly dressed, was pacing up and down past the door of a house in the Rue des Grandes Augustins, in Paris. Having walked so much, like an indecisive lover who does not dare to appear before the first beloved in his life, no matter how accessible she may be, the young man finally stepped over the threshold of the door and asked if the master Francois Porbus was in.
Having received an affirmative answer from the old woman who was sweeping the canopy, the young man began to slowly rise, stopping at each step, just like a new courtier, preoccupied with the thought of what kind of reception the king would give him. Climbing up the spiral staircase, the young man stood on the landing, still not daring to touch the fancy hammer that adorned the door of the workshop, where, probably, the painter of Henry IV, forgotten by Marie Medici for the sake of Rubens, was working at that hour.
The young man experienced that strong feeling that must have made the hearts of great artists beat when, full of youthful fervor and love for art, they approached a man of genius or a great work. In human feelings there is a time for the first flowering, generated by noble impulses, gradually weakening, when happiness becomes only a memory, and glory a lie. Among the short-lived agitations of the heart, nothing resembles love so much as the young passion of the artist, who tastes the first wonderful torments on the path of glory and misfortune - a passion full of courage and timidity, vague faith and inevitable disappointments. The one who, during the years of lack of money and the first creative ideas, did not feel trepidation when meeting a great master, will always lack one string in his soul, some kind of brush stroke, some kind of feeling in creativity, some elusive poetic shade. Some self-satisfied braggarts, who too soon believed in their future, seem smart people only to fools. In this respect, everything spoke in favor of the unknown young man, if talent is measured by those manifestations of initial timidity, by that inexplicable shyness that people created for fame easily lose when constantly revolving in the field of art, just as beautiful women lose their timidity by constantly practicing coquetry. . The habit of success drowns out doubts, and modesty is, perhaps, one of the types of doubt.
Dejected by need and surprised at this moment by his own audacity, the poor newcomer would not have dared to enter the artist, to whom we owe a beautiful portrait of Henry IV, if an unexpected opportunity had not come to the rescue. An old man came up the stairs. From his strange costume, from his magnificent lace collar, from his important, confident gait, the young man guessed that this was either a patron or a friend of the master, and, taking a step back to make way for him, he began to examine him with curiosity, in the hope of finding in him the kindness of an artist or the kindness characteristic of art lovers - but in the face of the old man there was something diabolical and something else elusive, peculiar, so attractive to the artist. Imagine a high, prominent, receding forehead hanging over a small, flat, upturned nose, like that of Rabelais or Socrates; lips mocking and wrinkled; short, haughtily raised chin; gray pointed beard; green, the color of sea water, eyes that seemed faded with age, but, judging by the mother-of-pearl tints of protein, were still sometimes capable of throwing a magnetic glance in a moment of anger or delight. However, this face seemed faded not so much from old age, but from those thoughts that wear out both soul and body. Eyelashes had already fallen out, and sparse hairs were barely noticeable on the superciliary arches. Place this head against a frail and weak body, frame it with lace, shining white and striking in the fineness of the workmanship, throw a heavy gold chain over the old man's black coat, and you will get an imperfect image of this person, to whom the weak lighting of the stairs gave a fantastic shade. You would say that this is a Rembrandt portrait, leaving its frame and silently moving in the semi-darkness, so beloved by the great artist.
The old man cast a penetrating glance at the young man, knocked three times, and said to a sickly man of about forty who opened the door:
- Good afternoon, master.
Porbus bowed politely; he let the young man in, believing that he had come with the old man, and no longer paid any attention to him, especially since the newcomer froze in admiration, like all born artists who first got into the studio, where they can peep some of the techniques of art. An open window pierced in the vault illuminated Master Porbus's room. The light was concentrated on an easel with a canvas attached to it, where only three or four white strokes were laid, and did not reach the corners of this vast room, in which darkness reigned; but whimsical reflections either lit in the brown semi-darkness silvery sparkles on the bulges of the Reitar cuirass hanging on the wall, or they outlined in a sharp stripe the polished carved cornice of an ancient cabinet lined with rare crockery, then dotted with shiny dots the pimply surface of some old curtains of gold brocade, picked up by large folds, which probably served as nature for some picture.
Plaster casts of naked muscles, fragments and torsos of ancient goddesses, lovingly polished by the kisses of centuries, cluttered shelves and consoles.
Countless sketches, sketches made with three pencils, sanguine or pen, covered the walls up to the ceiling. Drawers of paints, bottles of oils and essences, overturned benches left only a narrow passage to get to the high window; the light from it fell directly on the pale face of Porbus and on the bare, ivory-colored skull of a strange man. The attention of the young man was absorbed by only one picture, already famous even in those troubled, troubled times, so that stubborn people came to see it, to whom we owe the preservation of the sacred fire in the days of timelessness. This beautiful page of art depicted Mary of Egypt intending to pay for the crossing in a boat. The masterpiece intended for Marie de Medici was subsequently sold by her in her days of need.
“I like your saint,” the old man said to Porbus, “I would pay you ten gold crowns in addition to what the queen gives, but try to compete with her ... damn it!
- Do you like this thing?
- Hehe, do you like it? muttered the old man. - Yes and no. Your woman is well built, but she is not alive. All you artists just need to draw the figure correctly, so that everything is in place according to the laws of anatomy. that from time to time you look at a naked woman standing in front of you on the table, you believe that you are reproducing nature, you imagine that you are artists and that you have stolen the secret from God ... Brrr!
To be a great poet, it is not enough to know the syntax perfectly and not make mistakes in the language! Look at your saint, Porbus! At first glance, she seems charming, but, looking at her longer, you notice that she has grown to the canvas and that she could not be walked around.
It is only a silhouette with one front side, only a carved image, a likeness of a woman that could neither turn nor change position, I do not feel the air between these hands and the background of the picture; lack of space and depth; meanwhile, the laws of distance are fully observed, the aerial perspective is observed exactly; but in spite of all these commendable efforts, I cannot believe that this beautiful body should be enlivened by the warm breath of life; it seems to me that if I put my hand on this rounded chest, I will feel that it is cold as marble! No, my friend, blood does not flow in this ivory body, life does not spill like purple dew through the veins and veins that intertwine with a net under the amber transparency of the skin on the temples and on the chest. This place is breathing, well, but the other is completely motionless, life and death are fighting in every particle of the picture; here one senses a woman, there a statue, and further on a corpse. Your creation is imperfect. You managed to breathe only a part of your soul into your beloved creation. The torch of Prometheus died out more than once in your hands, and the heavenly fire did not touch many places in your picture.
- But why, dear teacher? Porbus said respectfully to the old man, while the young man could hardly restrain himself from attacking him with his fists.
- But why! - said the old man. - You fluctuated between two systems, between drawing and paint, between the phlegmatic pettiness, harsh precision of the old German masters and the dazzling passion, gracious generosity of Italian artists. You wanted to imitate Hans Holbein and Titian, Albrecht Dürer and Paolo Veronese at the same time. Of course, that was a great claim. But what happened? You have not achieved the harsh charm of dryness, nor the illusion of chiaroscuro. As molten copper breaks through a form that is too fragile, so here the rich and golden tones of Titian broke through the strict contour of Albrecht Dürer into which you squeezed them.
Elsewhere, the design held its own and endured the splendid exuberance of the Venetian palette. The face has neither perfection of drawing nor perfection of color, and it bears traces of your unfortunate indecision. Since you did not feel behind you sufficient strength to fuse both competing manners of writing on the fire of your genius, then you had to resolutely choose one or the other in order to achieve at least that unity that reproduces one of the features of living nature. You are truthful only in the middle parts; the contours are wrong, they don't round off, and you don't expect anything behind them. There is truth here,” said the old man, pointing to the chest of the saint. “And then here again,” he continued, marking the point where the shoulder ended in the picture. “But here,” he said, again returning to the middle of his chest, “everything is wrong here ... Let's leave any analysis, otherwise you will come to despair ...
The old man sat down on a bench, leaned his head on his hands and fell silent.
“Master,” Porbus told him, “yet I have studied this chest on a naked body a lot, but, unfortunately for us, nature gives rise to such impressions that seem incredible on the canvas ...
- The task of art is not to copy nature, but to express it. You are not a miserable copyist, but a poet! the old man exclaimed briskly, cutting Porbus off with an imperious gesture. “Otherwise, the sculptor would have done his job by removing the plaster mold from the woman. Well, try it, remove the plaster mold from the hand of your beloved and put it in front of you - you will not see the slightest resemblance, it will be the hand of a corpse, and you will have to turn to a sculptor who, without giving an exact copy, will convey movement and life. We must grasp the soul, the meaning, the characteristic appearance of things and beings. Impression!
Impression! Why, they are only accidents of life, and not life itself! The hand, since I have taken this example, the hand not only constitutes a part of the human body - it expresses and continues the thought that must be grasped and conveyed. Neither the artist, nor the poet, nor the sculptor should separate the impression from the cause, since they are inseparable - one in the other. This is the true purpose of the struggle. Many artists win instinctively, unaware of such a task of art. You are drawing a woman, but you do not see her. This is not the way to wrest the secret from nature. You reproduce, without realizing it, the same model that you copied from your teacher. You do not know the form intimately enough, you do not follow it lovingly and stubbornly enough in all its turns and retreats. Beauty is strict and capricious, it does not come so easily, you need to wait for a favorable hour, track it down and, seizing it, hold it tightly in order to force it to surrender.
The form is Proteus, much more elusive and rich in artifice than the Proteus of myth! Only after a long struggle can she be forced to show herself in her present form. You are all content with the first appearance in which she agrees to appear to you, or, in extreme cases, the second, third; that's not how victorious wrestlers act. These inflexible artists do not allow themselves to be deceived by all sorts of twists and turns and persist until they force nature to show itself completely naked, in its true essence. This is what Raphael did, - said the old man, taking off his black velvet cap from his head to express his admiration for the king of art. - The great superiority of Raphael is a consequence of his ability to deeply feel, which, as it were, breaks his form. The form in his creations is the same as it should be with us, only an intermediary for the transmission of ideas, sensations, versatile poetry. Every image is a whole world - it is a portrait, the model of which was a majestic vision, illuminated by light, indicated to us by an inner voice and appearing before us without covers, if the heavenly finger indicates to us the means of expression, the source of which is all past life. You clothe your women in fine clothes of flesh, adorn them with a beautiful cloak of curls, but where is the blood that flows through the veins, generating calm or passion and making a very special visual impression? Your saint is a brunette, but these colors, my poor Porbus, are taken from a blonde! That is why the faces you have created are only painted ghosts that you pass in a row before our eyes - and this is what you call painting and art!
Just because you have made something more like a woman than a house, you imagine that you have reached the goal, and, proud that you do not need inscriptions for your images - currus venustus or pulcher homo - like the first painters, you imagine yourself amazing artists! .. Ha ha ...
No, you have not yet reached this, my dear comrades, you will have to draw a lot of pencils, lime a lot of canvases, before you become artists.
Quite rightly, a woman holds her head like this, she lifts her skirt like that, the fatigue in her eyes glows with such submissive tenderness, the fluttering shadow of her eyelashes trembles just like that on her cheeks. All this is so - and not so! What is missing here? A trifle, but this trifle is everything. You grasp the appearance of life, but do not express its overflowing excess; do not express what, perhaps, is the soul and which, like a cloud, envelops the surface of bodies; in other words, you do not express that flourishing charm of life, which was captured by Titian and Raphael. Starting from the highest point of your achievements and moving on, you can perhaps create a beautiful painting, but you tire too soon. Ordinary people are delighted, and a true connoisseur smiles. Oh Mabuse! exclaimed this strange man. “O my teacher, you are a thief, you took your life with you! .. For all that,” the old man continued, “this canvas is better than the canvases of the insolent Rubens with mountains of Flemish meat sprinkled with rouge, with streams of red hair and screaming colors. At least you have here color, feeling and design - the three essential parts of Art.
- But this saint is delightful, sir! the young man exclaimed loudly, awakening from deep thought. - In both faces, in the face of the saint and in the face of the boatman, one can feel the subtlety of artistic design, unknown to Italian masters. I don't know any of them who could have invented such an expression of hesitation in a boatman.
- Is this your boy? Porbus asked the old man.
- Alas, teacher, forgive me for impudence, - the newcomer answered, blushing.
- I am unknown, small by attraction and arrived only recently in this city, the source of all knowledge.
- Get to work! Porbus told him, handing him a red pencil and paper.
An unknown young man copied the figure of Mary with quick strokes.
- Oh! .. - exclaimed the old man. - Your name? The young man signed under the picture:
“Nicolas Poussin.” “Not bad for a beginner,” said the strange old man, who reasoned so madly. - I see you can talk about painting. I don't blame you for admiring Saint Porbus. For everyone, this thing is a great work, and only those who are initiated into the most secret secrets of art know what its errors are. But since you are worthy to give you a lesson and are able to understand, I will now show you what a trifle is required to complete this picture. Look into all eyes and strain all attention. Never, perhaps, will you have another such opportunity to learn. Give me your palette, Porbus.
Porbus went for a palette and brushes. The old man, impulsively rolling up his sleeves, stuck his thumb through the hole of the motley palette, laden with colors, which Porbus handed him; he almost snatched from his hands a handful of brushes of various sizes, and suddenly the old man's beard, trimmed in a wedge, moved menacingly, expressing with its movements the anxiety of a passionate fantasy.
Picking up the paint with a brush, he grumbled through his teeth:
- These tones should be thrown out the window along with their compiler, they are disgustingly harsh and false - how to write with this?
Then, with feverish speed, he dipped the tips of his brushes into various colors, sometimes running through the entire scale faster than the church organist running over the keys during the Easter hymn O filii.
Porbus and Poussin stood on both sides of the canvas, immersed in deep contemplation.
“You see, young man,” the old man said without turning around, “you see how with the help of two or three strokes and one bluish-transparent stroke it was possible to blow air around the head of this poor saint, who must have been completely suffocated and died in such a stuffy atmosphere.
Look how these folds are swaying now and how it became clear that the breeze plays with them! Before it seemed that it was a starched canvas, stabbed with pins. Do you notice how faithfully it conveys the velvety elasticity of a girl's skin this light highlight, which I have just put on my chest, and how these mixed tones - red-brown and burnt ocher - spilled warmth over this large shaded space, gray and cold, where the blood froze instead of moving? Youth. young man, no teacher will teach you what I am showing you now! Only Mabuse knew the secret of how to give life to figures. Mabuse had only one student - me. I didn't have them at all, and I'm old. You're smart enough to understand the rest of what I'm hinting at.
Speaking like this, the old eccentric meanwhile corrected different parts of the picture: he applied two strokes here, one stroke there, and each time so opportunely that a kind of new painting arose, a painting saturated with light. He worked so passionately, so furiously, that sweat broke out on his bare skull; he acted so nimbly, with such sharp, impatient movements, that it seemed to the young Poussin that this strange man was possessed by a demon and, against his will, was leading him by his hand according to his whim. The supernatural sparkle of the eyes, the convulsive wave of the hand, as if overcoming resistance, gave some plausibility to this idea, so seductive for youthful fantasy.
The old man went on with his work, saying:
- Puff! Puff! Puff! That's how it smears, young man! Here, my strokes, revive these icy tones. Come on! So so so! he said, reviving those parts which he pointed to as lifeless, destroying the inconsistency in the physique with a few spots of color and restoring the unity of tone that would correspond to an ardent Egyptian. - You see, honey, only the last strokes matter. Porbus put hundreds of them, but I put only one. No one will give thanks for what lies below. Remember it well!
Finally, this demon stopped and, turning to Porbus and Poussin, dumbfounded with admiration, said to them:
- This thing is still far from my "Beautiful Noiseza", but under such a work you can put your name. Yes, I would subscribe to this picture,” he added, getting up to get a mirror in which he began to examine it. "Now let's go to breakfast," he said. - I ask you both to me. I'll treat you to smoked ham and good wine. Hehe, despite the bad times, we'll talk about painting. We still mean something! Here is a young man not without abilities, - he added, hitting Nicolas Poussin on the shoulder.
Here, drawing attention to the pitiful jacket of the Norman, the old man took out a leather purse from behind his sash, rummaged through it, took out two gold ones and, handing them to Poussin, said:
- I'm buying your drawing.
“Take it,” Porbus said to Poussin, seeing that he shuddered and blushed with shame, because the pride of the poor man spoke in the young artist. - Take it, his purse is stuffed tighter than the king's!
The three of them left the workshop and, talking about art, reached a beautiful wooden house that stood near the Pont Saint-Michel, which delighted Poussin with its decorations, door knocker, window sashes and arabesques. The future artist suddenly found himself in the reception room, near a blazing fireplace, near a table laden with delicious dishes, and, by unheard-of happiness, in the company of two great artists, so sweet in manner.
“Young man,” Porbus said to the newcomer, seeing that he was staring at one of the paintings, “do not look too closely at this canvas, otherwise you will fall into despair.
It was "Adam" - a picture painted by Mabuse in order to be released from prison, where he was kept for so long by creditors. The whole figure of Adam was indeed full of such a powerful reality that from that moment Poussin understood the true meaning of the obscure words of the old man. And he looked at the picture with an air of satisfaction, but without much enthusiasm, as if thinking at the same time:
"I write better."
“There is life in it,” he said, “my poor teacher has outdone himself here, but in the depths of the picture he has not quite reached truthfulness. The man himself is quite alive, he is about to get up and come to us. But the air we breathe, the sky we see, the wind we feel are not there! Yes, and a person here is only a person. Meanwhile, in this single person, who has just left the hands of God, something divine should have been felt, and this is what is lacking. Mabuse himself admitted this with sadness when he was not drunk.
Poussin looked with restless curiosity first at the old man, then at Porbus.
He approached the latter, probably intending to ask the name of the owner of the house; but the artist, with a mysterious look, put his finger to his lips, and the young man, keenly interested, said nothing, hoping sooner or later, from some randomly dropped words, to guess the name of the owner, undoubtedly a rich and brilliant man, as evidenced enough by the respect shown to him Porbus, and those marvelous works with which the room was filled.
Seeing a magnificent portrait of a woman on a dark oak panel, Poussin exclaimed:
- What a beautiful Giorgione!
- No! - objected the old man. - Before you is one of my early gizmos.
- Lord, then I'm visiting the very god of painting! - said Poussin ingenuously.
The elder smiled like a man long accustomed to this kind of praise.
“Frenhofer, my teacher,” said Porbus, “will you give me some of your good Rhenish wine?”
“Two barrels,” replied the old man, “one as a reward for the pleasure I received this morning from your beautiful sinner, and the other as a token of friendship.”
“Ah, if it were not for my constant illnesses,” continued Porbus, “and if you would allow me to look at your “Beautiful Noisezu”, I would then create a work high, large, penetrating, and I would paint figures in human growth.
- Show my work?! exclaimed the old man in great agitation. - No no! I still have to complete it. Yesterday evening, - said the old man, - I thought that I had finished my Noiseza. Her eyes seemed moist to me, and her body animated. Her braids writhed. She breathed! Although I have found a way to depict the convexity and roundness of nature on a flat canvas, but this morning, in the light, I realized my mistake. Ah, to achieve ultimate success, I studied thoroughly the great masters of color, I examined, I examined layer after layer of the picture of Titian himself, the king of light. I, like this greatest artist, applied the initial drawing of the face with light and bold strokes, because the shadow is only an accident, remember this, my boy, Then I returned to my work and with the help of penumbra and transparent tones, which I gradually thickened , conveyed the shadows, down to black, to the deepest; after all, with ordinary artists, nature in those places where a shadow falls on it, as it were, consists of a different substance than in places illuminated - it is wood, bronze, anything but a shaded body.
It is felt that if the figures changed their position, the shadowed places would not stand out, would not be illuminated. I have avoided this mistake, which many of the famous artists have fallen into, and I feel real whiteness under the thickest shadow. I did not draw the figure in sharp contours, as many ignorant artists who imagine that they write correctly only because they write out every line smoothly and carefully, and I did not expose the smallest anatomical details, because the human body does not end with lines.
Balzac has a short story "The Unknown Masterpiece" - a story about the artist; old man Frenhofer is a collective image of the genius of painting. There was no such painter in reality, Balzac created an ideal creator, put manifestos into his mouth, which, by radicalness, surpass everything that was said later in avant-garde circles; Frenhofer (that is, the author himself, Balzac) actually came up with a new art.
He was the first to speak about the synthesis of drawing and painting, light and color, space and object; he was the first to express a simple - but such an impossibly bold idea: art should form an autonomous reality separate from reality. And when this happens, the reality of art will influence the reality of life, transform it. In all previous eras, it was believed that art is a reflection of life. Options are possible: idealization, mirror image, critical reflection - but the secondary position in relation to reality, fixed by Plato, has never been questioned. The fact that the beautiful is divided into disciplines: painting, sculpture, poetry, music - is connected precisely with the fact that art performs a kind of service function in relation to life, and is required in one area, then in another. But when art becomes all-encompassing, its service role will go away.
The synthesis of the arts is an attempt to change its status. The synthesis of all the arts is the main idea of the avant-garde; art, in fact, the avant-garde replaced religion. The idea of the synthesis of arts was prepared for a long time - Goethe wrote about the luminosity of color, something about the synthesis of arts can be found in Wölfflin; In general, the German Enlightenment poses the problem of synthesis. But it is one thing to pose a problem, quite another thing to propose its practical solution. Balzac, who himself was a genius (true, in literature, but this is almost the same - a good writer paints with a word), described the genius of painting and his method of work; method - that is, how exactly it is necessary to put strokes so that the desired synthesis appears. Evidence has been preserved: when Cezanne was read a couple of paragraphs of the “Unknown Masterpiece” (read to him by Emile Bernard), then Cezanne, out of excitement, did not even find words; he only pressed his hand to his chest - he wanted to show that the story was written about him.
It was precisely Cezanne who positioned his strokes in this way - he would strike with a brush in one place, then in another, and again there, in the corner of the canvas, to create the impression of a moving air mass, thick air filled with color; it was Cezanne who took every stain extremely responsibly - unpainted centimeters remained on his canvases: he complained that he did not know what color to put on this piece of canvas. This happened because Cezanne demanded several functions from a colored stroke at once: to convey color, to fix spatial remoteness, to become an element in the construction of a common building of the atmosphere.
And listening to Bernard read him a description of Frenhofer's work (selective touch with a brush to different parts of the canvas: "Bang! Bang! My strokes! That's how it's done, young man!") - Cezanne went into a frenzy, it turns out he is on the right track: after all that's exactly how he worked.
Every stroke of Cezanne is a synthesis of color and light, a synthesis of space and object - it turns out that Balzac foresaw this synthesis. Space is the South, Italy, blue air, a perspective invented by Paolo Uccello. The object is the North, Germany, a corrosive drawing by Dürer, a piercing line, a scientific analysis. North and South were disintegrating politically, religious wars consolidated the disintegration: the South was Catholic, the North was Protestant. These are two different aesthetics and two dissimilar styles of reasoning. To merge the South and the North together has been the dream of every politician since the time of Charlemagne, and the age-old political drama of Europe consists in the fact that they tried to piece together the Carolingian inheritance that was falling apart, and the stubborn inheritance crumbled, did not obey the political will; Otto, Heinrich the Fowler, Karl the Fifth Habsburg, Napoleon, de Gaulle's project of the United States of Europe - all this was started for the sake of the great plan of unification, for the sake of the synthesis of space and object, South and North.
But if the politicians did it clumsily, and sometimes even monstrously, then the artist is obliged to show the solution on a different level. Through the mouth of Frenhofer, a reproach was formulated to the European art of that time, which immediately follows the Renaissance. That was a time without a coherent program: the Holy Roman Empire was disintegrating into nation-states, the unified plan of the Renaissance died. The didactics of the Renaissance was replaced by mannered genre scenes. Art historians sometimes call "Mannerism" an intermediate style between the Renaissance and Baroque, sometimes they call the Baroque a kind of Mannerism that developed to a state scale.
It was a demi-seasonal, eclectic era; Europe was looking for itself. Turned to French art, Frenhofer's reproach applies to all European art between the minds as a whole - this is a diagnosis. “You fluctuated between two systems, between drawing and paint, between the phlegmatic pettiness, cruel precision of the old German masters and the dazzling passion and benevolent generosity of Italian artists. What happened? You have not achieved either the harsh charm of dryness or the illusion of chiaroscuro. And then Frenhofer develops the idea of synthesis - he learned from his teacher, the mysterious Mabuse; the artist Mabuse allegedly possessed the secret of the synthesis of the North and the South (“O Mabuse, great teacher, you stole my heart!”).
Mabuse is the nickname of the real-life artist Jan Gossaert, a classical Burgundian painter, a student of Gerard David. Balzac deliberately leaves us such an exact address of his utopia - he gives ideal painting a specific registration. It remains only to trace exactly where Balzac points. Generally speaking, the history of art, like the Old Testament, has the quality of representing - the entire chronology of mankind. Not missing a single minute. “Abraham gave birth to Isaac”, and so on through all clans and tribes - we can easily reach the Virgin Mary; in the history of art exactly the same; You have to be careful not to miss anything. Jan Gossar, surnamed Mabuse, studied with Gerard David, who studied with Hans Memling, the great artist of Bruges, and Hans Memling was a student of the incomparable Roger van der Weyden, and Roger with Robert Campin; this list of names is perhaps the most significant in the history of world art.
Suffice it to say that without Roger van der Weyden, who brought up the artists of the Italian Renaissance by personal example, the Italian Quattrocento would have been different. All of the artists listed above are sometimes referred to as "early Netherlandish masters" - this is an inaccurate designation: no Netherlands existed at that time; the mentioned masters are citizens of the Duchy of Burgundy, a powerful state that united the lands of modern France (Burgundy), the modern Netherlands and Belgium, as well as northern Germany (Friesland). The aesthetic views of these people, their manner of painting, the figurative structure of their works - does not at all belong to the Netherlandish painting (speaking of the Netherlandish painting, we involuntarily imagine the school of Rembrandt or Vermeer); but in this case, the aesthetic principles are completely different, completely dissimilar to the later art of Holland.
The Duchy of Burgundy, which arose at the end of the 14th century, united the South and North of Europe, connected the traditions of France and Holland in the most natural way - accordingly, the art of medieval Burgundy was the desired synthesis that the character of Balzac speaks of. It was a combination of generous color and dry form; a combination of an endless sunny perspective and a laconic, strong-willed characterization. The heroes of Burgundy painting, as a rule, are people of the knightly class and their ladies; the artists describe the life of the ceremonial court - and the court of Burgundy at that time surpassed the court of France in splendor and wealth. The basis for the emergence of the Duchy of Burgundy was a chivalrous feat: in the battle of Poitiers, the son of the French king John II, 14-year-old Philip, did not leave his father in a moment of mortal danger. They fought on foot, surrounded by horsemen; were left alone - the older brothers and seneschals fled.
The teenager stood behind his father, covering his father from a treacherous blow, and, looking around, warned: “Sir, father, the danger is on the right! Sovereign father, the danger is on the left! This great episode of history (captured, by the way, by Delacroix - see the painting "The Battle of Poitiers"), was the reason that Philip the Brave, the youngest of four sons, who could not get the crown, was given the duchy. Burgundy was given into apanage (that is, into free administration until Philip's dynasty was interrupted). This is how a territory separate from France was formed, this is how a state arose that quickly became the most powerful in central Europe. By the time Philip's grandson, Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy, became a rival to Louis XI of France and began to argue about who owns Burgundy, France or vice versa, by this time the superiority of Burgundy had become obvious in many aspects. The fact that the duchy owed its origin to the feat of chivalry made the code of chivalry a state ideology. This is a very strange phenomenon for feudal Europe, and even more so for the absolutist Europe that was then emerging. The hierarchy of relations between the vassal nobility and the king (monarch - and barons, tsar - and boyars), which was the main plot of other European courts, was replaced in Burgundy by knightly etiquette. The expansion of territories through successful marriages, the freedom and wealth of handicraft workshops - all this distinguished Burgundy from those countries that seized land at the cost of abundant blood of vassals, whose rights became null and void under the conditions of the Hundred Years War.
Burgundy maneuvered in the Hundred Years' War, adjoining one or the other warring side, often sided with the British; the same tactics - which allowed the duchy to grow and maintain independence - were adopted by the cities of the duchy itself, which demanded for themselves and their workshops as many rights as the cities of neighboring states could not dream of. The formal administrative center of the duchy was in Dijon, but the courtly court traveled, often changed capitals, creating a cultural center in Dijon, then in Ghent, then in Bruges, then in Brussels, then in Antwerp. This does not mean that the intellectual center is constantly shifting - so, soon after the collapse of the Duchy of Burgundy, it was not Brussels, not Antwerp and not Bruges that became such a center of attraction for the arts, but Lyon became such, which for some time became a haven of humanistic knowledge. François Rabelais, Bonaventure Deperrier and others sought refuge in Lyon, the humanists who fled from Paris grouped around the strange court of Margarine of Navarre. Different cities have consistently become new centers of attraction: the intellectual geography of Europe is saturated. But in this case we are talking about something else; The Duchy of Burgundy, combining the traditions of Latin courtliness and Netherlandish pedantry, was the synthesis that Frenhofer was worried about; hence the spatial movements of the yard.
The desired unity of personalism and public morality, colorfulness and linearity - was inherent in Burgundian culture simply by the fact of the emergence of this strange country; it was a very mobile culture. A special combination of courtly southern lightness, inherited from the French component of culture, and northern severity arose - in the visual arts this gave a striking result.
The artist of the Duchy of Burgundy - he, of course, was an artist of the court, but there was no unchanging court, the structure of relations was more reminiscent of relationships within the Italian city-states of that time than, for example, the Madrid Escorial or the court of London. Van Eycks worked in Ghent, Menling in Bruges, van der Weyden spent his life traveling, changing cities; there is a definition given by the historian Huizinga: "Franco-Brussels culture" - among other things, this combination symbolizes a kind of flexibility in relations with the cultural pattern. The culture of such a symbiotic country naturally combined the incompatible, achieved what the Balzac hero dreamed of.
We can say that in such art the quintessence of European consciousness was revealed. Burgundy painting is easy to distinguish from the rest. You find yourself in a hall with Burgundian masters, and your perception becomes sharper: this happens, for example, in unexpectedly bright light: you suddenly see objects clearly; this is what happens when reading a very clear philosophical text, when the author finds simple words to designate concepts. You enter the hall with paintings by Robert Campin, Roger van der Weyden, Dirk Boats, Hans Memling - and you get the feeling that you are being told only essential, sometimes unpleasant and prickly, but such that you absolutely need to know.
In Burgundian painting, the concept of "duty" is extremely strong - probably inherited from the knightly code. What an Italian, Dutch, German artist may not notice (a wrinkle, puffiness, curvature, etc.) the Burgundian will place in a prominent place. Sharp edges, prickly plastic, precise details - there is not a single line that is not thought through to the end. The theme of St. Sebastian is loved for the penetrating pain: Memling painted the execution of the saint with the same cruelty as Goya depicted “The Execution of May 3rd”: the tormentors shoot from their bows at close range. They shoot, choosing a place where to drive an arrow. And such a penetratingly corrosive attitude to the subject is the main characteristic of Burgundian art. The views of the heroes are intent and extended, stretching through the picture to the subject of study; the gestures are swift and grasping, the blades of the swords are narrow and honed. High cheekbones, aquiline noses, long prehensile fingers. From prickly glances - attentiveness to details; Burgundy painting is picky about shades of thought and nuances of mood. It is not enough for them to say in general, these painters - everything must be told as accurately as possible.
In such an atmosphere, a pictorial language is born, which has become the quintessence of the European worldview - it was Burgundy who invented oil painting. Only this technique can convey the nuances of feelings. It's not about detailed drawing: a small detail can be painted with tempera, but the vibration of mood, the transition of emotion can only be depicted with oil paints. Oil painting gives what a complex phrase with adverbial phrases gives in literature: you can add, strengthen, clarify what has been said.
A complex writing arose, in several layers; speech was made extremely difficult; on a bright underpainting, they began to paint with glazes (i.e., transparent layers). So in the fifteenth century in Burgundy, on the basis of the synthesis of Northern and Southern Europe, a sophisticated language of art arose, oil painting, without which it is impossible to imagine a sophisticated European consciousness. The van Eyck brothers invented the technique of oil painting - they began to dilute the pigment with linseed oil. Previously, the paint was opaque, opaque; the color could be bright but never complex; after Van Eyck, the European statement ceased to be declarative and became thoughtful, multivariate. The technique of oil painting embodies university and cathedral Europe; in its complexity, oil painting is similar to the scholarly debate of the scholastics. Just as universities adopted the order of discussing a problem, so the artist's statement acquired an internal logic and mandatory development: thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Painting with oil paints assumed a sequence: definition of a theme, premise, main thesis, development, counterargument, generalization, conclusion.
This became possible only when the transparent substance of the paint appeared. Oil painting was borrowed from Burgundy and transported to Italy by the Sicilian master Antonello de Messina, who spent several years in Burgundy and then worked in Venice. The technique of oil painting was assimilated by the masters of the Italian Quattrocento, oil painting supplanted fresco and tempera and changed Venetian and Florentine painting. Without the technique of oil painting, there would be no complex and meaningful Leonardo, only oil made his sfumato possible.
All the complexity of European painting - and European fine art is valuable precisely by the complexity of expression - is possible only thanks to the technique of the Van Eyck brothers. Neither the twilight of Rembrandt, nor the tenebroso of Caravaggio would have been possible in a different technique - just as the free syllable of Erasmus would have been impossible without the rules of university discussion (by the way, Erasmus of Rotterdam worked on the territory of the Duchy of Burgundy). Here it is appropriate to note that the first thing that modern glamorous fine art has abandoned is oil painting: complexity and ambiguity have become a burden for fashion. In those years, oil painting symbolized the flourishing of Europe, the acquisition of its own language.
Decisive for the aesthetics of the Renaissance was the stay of Roger van der Weyden at the Ferrara court in northern Italy. Duke Lionello de Este, the ruler of Ferrara, brought together the greatest masters of the century - Roger van der Weyden was called from Burgundy. He was older than colleagues Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini and Cosimo Turo, who worked there; van der Weyden's influence on the Italians was crushing - he instilled a special intonation in the Italian Renaissance. This is a firm, somewhat dry, reserved manner, avoiding excessively loud phrases; this is the calm speech of a strong man who does not need raised tones - but pumps up tension with an inexorable sequence. The manner of Roger van der Weyden is what Van Gogh tried to convey in the characterization of the early masters when he wrote: “It is amazing how you can remain cool, experiencing such passion and exertion of all forces.”
Selected Italian masters learned this from Roger. The clenched passion of Andrea Mantegna, the suppressed hysteria of Cosimo Turo, the dry pathos of Bellini - they learned this from the chivalrous van der Weyden; and these are the properties of the chivalrous Burgundian culture. The combination of refined (complex, sophisticated knowledge) and hysterical experience is a very strange combination. Usually the earnestness of religious art presupposes directness of expression, brevity of writing; the icon of the Savior the Fiery Eye shows us the face of the Savior, who looks directly and furiously, the Madonna Misericordia (Slavic analogue: Our Lady of Tenderness) covers the suffering with a heavenly oriflamme (Russian sound: the cover of the Virgin) humbly and quietly. But the Burgundian saints and martyrs of Mantegna experience faith as a personal feat, surrender to faith with that passion that borders on ecstasy. This is not mannerism, not posturing, this is just a knightly ritual that has become sacred; the combination of heavenly love and earthly love, which is natural for knightly ethics - (see Pushkin: “He tied a rosary around his neck instead of a scarf”).
Burgundian sculpture does not oppose these two principles of Aphrodita Urania - Aphrodita Pandemos, but finds the unity purely natural. The cult of the Beautiful Lady also embodies religious ecstasy; lady of the heart - represents the Mother of God; courtly love is secular ritual and prayer, all together. This is extremely important for the aesthetics of Burgundy, the knightly culture of the Middle Ages, which stepped towards humanism; we are accustomed to charting the path of European humanism from Antiquity to the Italian Renaissance and from there, through Protestantism, to the Enlightenment; but the Duchy of Burgundy exists in parallel with the Florence of the Medici - the history of Burgundy is just as beautiful and just as short; this bright flash - like the Venetian Republic, like the Medici Florence - is a kind of cultural experiment.
Burgundian art was gothic and sensual at the same time, religious and courtly at the same time. Gothic denies the natural beginning, Gothic strives upward, the sky pierces the sky with the spiers of cathedrals, Gothic heroes are made of veins and duty, flesh and joy do not exist. And the Burgundian heroes have a special way - their passion is both earthly and ecstatic. If you convey the essence of the Burgundian manner in one sentence, you need to say this: this is the experience of the religious principle as a personal sensory experience, this is secular religiosity, that is, what is characteristic of the code of chivalry. Passion for the Mother of God as for the Lady of the Heart - it was this code of chivalry that formed the basis of the aesthetic canons of the Burgundian artistic language.
Looking at the paintings of the Burgundian masters, it seems that during these years a special breed of people was bred in the center of Europe - however, we are not surprised at the special plasticity of the Venetians in the paintings of Tintoretto, the rounded lines of the figures and the viscous color scheme of the air; so why not see in the paintings of Burgundian artists their own extraordinary cultural hybrid in every gesture, in the plasticity of the characters. This is how ascetic faces arose, typical of the paintings of Dirk Boats or Hans Memling - somewhat elongated faces, with deeply sunken, earnest eyes; long necks, Elgrekian proportions of elongated bodies.
This is by no means an idealization; the Burgundians had much less of it than their Italian counterparts; drawing their patrons Robert Campin and Roger van der Weyden gave them their due in all respects. The knighthood of the Burgundian court (the main order of knightly valor - the Order of the Golden Fleece - was established here in 1430), the independent position of the duchy was supported by intrigues; the policy of maneuvering is not conducive to moral behavior.
Joan of Arc was captured by the Burgundians and sold to the British to be martyred. Van der Weyden left to posterity a portrait of Duke Philip the Good - who established the Order of the Golden Fleece and betrayed the Virgin of Orleans - before us is a neat, pale from moral insignificance man, thinking to himself that he is a demiurge. Van der Weyden, anticipating Francisco Goya or George Gross, wrote mercilessly and caustically. But the essence of his art - remained unchanged, whether he painted a saint or a dignitary scoundrel. Strange for us today, the fusion of sensual and southern and northern cultural principles - in essence, was nothing more than the very “European idea” for which Europe was united every time. When the Duchy of Burgundy fell apart and the national arts were formed, which we know today as Dutch and Flemish, they could no longer show this synthesis. After the death of Charles the Bold, the Netherlands ceded to Spain, Louis XI of France returned the Burgundian lands to the French crown. Flemish and Dutch art, which arose on the ruins of Burgundy, in principle denied the Burgundian aesthetics. The butcher shops, the fish stalls, the fat beauties and fat paintings of the Flemish masters are the direct opposite of Hans Memling, Dirk Bouts and Roger van der Weyden.
It is amazing that the same vine grows in the same place, but the wine is completely different. The Balzac hero Frenhofer speaks extremely unflatteringly about the painting of the Flemish Rubens: "... the canvases of this insolent Rubens with mountains of Flemish meat, sprinkled with blush, streams of red hair and flashy colors." Among other things, this phrase is curious in that Balzac in it breeds his own aesthetics and the aesthetics of Rubens; although they are often compared. It has become commonplace to liken Balzac's exuberant, lavish writing to an exuberant Rubensian test of painting; Balzac, however, thought otherwise - for him Rubens was too carnal and material - Balzac wrote a thought; generous, juicy, bright - but the thought, not the flesh. And in this he is a student of the Burgundian school - a student of van der Weyden, but not of Rubens.
The culture, however, has the peculiarity of keeping its gene pool for a long time - thus, the phenomenology of the spirit of Burgundy survived within the Dutch and Flemish cultures; the phenomenon of the work of Hieronymus Bosch, born at the end of the Duchy of Burgundy, shows us the same striking combination of the aesthetics of the North and the South; but it is even more shocking when you think about the legacy of a Fleming by birth, but a Burgundian by spirit - Brueghel.
Pieter Brueghel Sr., an artist of the North, but with such a resonant southern palette, the heir to the Burgundian Bosch and, in terms of composition, the direct heir of the Lembruck brothers (Burgundian miniaturists) and the undoubted successor of the plasticity of Hans Memling - Peter Brueghel is a striking example of how a cultural paradigm, once revealed appears again and again. And quite an incredible return of the idea of Burgundian culture should be considered the appearance of the brilliant Vincent van Gogh, who re-synthesized the South and the North. Burgundian culture woke up in him, in a Dutchman who moved to the south of France, organically combining the strict severity of the Netherlands and the blue air of the southern perspective. It seems incredible that the painter, who began his work with gloomy colors and rigid generalized forms, moved on to a sparkling palette and swirling strokes; explain this transition by the influence of impressionism (that is, the trend that was fashionable in those years).
But the fact of the matter is that Van Gogh was carried away by impressionism for a short time, fashion touched him on a tangent; he left both the techniques of pointillism and the fractional stroke of impressionism - almost instantly: this technique occupied him exactly for the duration of his stay in Paris. The Arles period is already something else; colors unprecedented for pastel impressionism, expressive forms incredible for impressionism. And - and this is important - the Dutch period seems to have latently resurrected: in the last canvases (they are sometimes called the "return of the Northern style"), the style of the Dutch period is resurrected - but already inextricably with the southern dynamics and color. This fusion is nothing but the "gene of Burgundy" - Van Gogh resurrected in his work that organic fusion of the North and South of Europe, which gave the Duchy of Burgundy in the 15th century.
Yes, the Duchy of Burgundy is no more, united Europe, as usual, ends up another project - another fiasco, but the cultural genetic memory lives on. At the end of Balzac's "Unknown Masterpiece" there is a disappointing diagnosis of the state of modern Europe; and in relation to the avant-garde, and in relation to a possible synthesis of the arts, and, in fact, European unity, there are no prospects.
It turns out that the efforts of synthesis are fruitless. The novel ends with the fact that admirers of the genius Frenhofer receive an invitation to the workshop of a genius - at last they will be able to see the masterpiece that the master has been writing for many years and hiding from view. The great painter who discovered the secret of the synthesis of light and color, space and object, line and color (and we will substitute here: North and South, freedom and order, etc.) - for several years he has been painting a beautiful woman, a symbol of harmony. Visitors are waiting to see the beauty itself. Here they are already in the studio, the artist tears off the curtain from the picture, and the audience does not see anything - only spots, only an absurd mixture of colors, meaningless combinations, chaotic abstraction. It seems that a beauty is hidden under this colorful porridge, but the artist, in the course of his fanatical and senseless work, simply smeared it over, destroyed the anthropomorphic features.
The artist worked earnestly - but did exactly the opposite of what was intended. Isn't this how European anthropomorphic art destroyed itself? These pages can be considered a prediction of the future: this is exactly what happened to Western art, which was looking for a synthesis and, as a result of the search, destroyed the human image, the very idea for which the work was going on. Anthropomorphic art was swept away by abstraction in the twentieth century - humanism was ousted from creativity in the course of the synthesis of arts, the avant-garde did not spare the tradition, and, as long as the tradition was associated with the phenomenon of man, therefore, they did not spare the image of man.
Balzac foresaw this process of dehumanization of art, dehumanization.
The systematic decomposition of the common language into the functions of speech - gradually led to the fact that a separate linguistic exercise became more important than the content of speech. It naturally happened that only dictatorships embody the whole human image in Europe of the last centuries - in colossus statues and propaganda posters; and the creativity of democracies cannot create an image of a person. We find the expression of freedom in the jokes of the oberiuts, in fragmentary replicas of conceptualism, in the deliberate innuendo of abstraction - but, pardon me, this is spiritual - the desire to create an integral world, which is what is important, and why it is interesting! And there is no whole world.
It can also be considered that Balzac's short story describes the sterility of European political unification, the constant failure of the Ghibelline party; Eternally doomed to attempts at unification and eternally decaying Europe, like the ancient Sisyphus, makes an endless ascent up the mountain and always goes down, defeated. In this case, the hodgepodge of colors on the canvas is a portrait of the beauty of Europe, who was defeated in an attempt to connect the incompatible, who lost herself. Europe exists, but at the same time, it does not exist - it is constantly hiding. It can also be assumed that Balzac created the image of the eidos - that is, that ideal synthesis of entities that Plato talks about; eidos is the unity of meanings.
We know what God looked like - Michelangelo painted his portrait; we know what Christ looked like - there are thousands of images; but we don’t know what an eidos looks like - so Balzac offers a possible option. And the fact that the eidos is not clearly visible to us, so Plato, in fact, warned about this: we can only see a shadow on the wall of the cave - a shadow of great accomplishments that take place outside our consciousness and being.
This should not, however, sound overly pessimistic. Europe is a fragile organism, and at the same time an incredibly resistant organism; she has perished many times already, and her art has repeatedly fallen into decay. At the end of The Unknown Masterpiece, the insane Frenhofer, suddenly realizing that there was nothing on the canvas, “and I worked for ten years!” - dies by first burning all his paintings. But is the burning of paintings - something out of the ordinary? You will not be surprised by burning paintings in Europe. Sandro Botticelli burned his paintings at the "bonfire of vanity" in Florence; paintings of "degenerate art" were burned in the squares of Munich and Berlin; in the fire of Florence, Michelangelo's fresco "The Battle of Cascina" perished, and Leonardo's sculpture melted. Icons were torn out of frames and burned by iconoclasts and revolutionaries; figurative art has been abandoned so many times that this only gives hope to those who resurrect the image. Europe was mowed down by the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, religious wars, civil wars of the twentieth century, which grew into world wars - Europe is no stranger to dying and rising from the ashes, this is its usual occupation.
The deadly disease of Europe is its permanent state, it is its peculiar health. Europe itself is that failed synthesis of arts and crafts, philosophical concepts and political projects, which - like a painting by Frenhofer - sometimes seems like an indistinct absurdity, absurdity, semantic mess - but suddenly a diamond of thought sparkles in this brew, and Kant or Descartes is born. Be that as it may, human history probably does not know a better artist than Frenhofer - and because we do not understand his plan, it does not follow that this plan is bad. Yes, on Frenhofer's canvas, visitors saw a meaningless combination of spots; but even on the canvases of Cezanne they saw a senseless combination of spots. They say that “half of the work is not shown to a fool”; it is quite possible that Frenhofer showed the audience just an unfinished canvas - hold off on your judgment: some time will pass, and the master will complete his masterpiece.
Page 3
Philosophical studies. The Unknown Masterpiece (1830) is dedicated to the relationship between the truth of life and the truth of art. Particularly important are the positions of the artists Porbus (Francois Porbus the Younger (1570-1620) - a Flemish artist who worked in Paris) and Frenhofer - a person fictitious by the author. The clash of their positions reveals Balzac's attitude to creativity. Frenhofer states: “The purpose of art is not to copy nature, but to express it. Otherwise, the sculptor would have performed his work by removing a plaster copy from a woman. We must grasp soul, meaning, movement and life.” Frenhofer himself sets himself an impossible goal that is contrary to true art: he wants to create a living woman on the canvas with the help of paints. It even seems to him that she smiles at him, that she - his Beautiful Noiseza - breathes, her whole appearance, physical and spiritual, surpasses the appearance of a real person. However, only Frenhofer himself sees this ideal and perfectly executed creature, and his students, including Porbus, saw in the corner of the picture “the tip of a bare leg, standing out from the chaos of colors, tones, indefinite shades, forming a kind of shapeless nebula - the tip of a lovely leg, living leg. The enthusiasm, on the one hand, for form, and on the other hand, for the desire to put art above reality and replace reality with it, led the brilliant artist to disaster. Balzac himself, not accepting either subjectivity or copying in art, is convinced that it should express nature, grasp its soul and meaning.
The author called the philosophical story “Shagreen Skin” (1831) “the formula of our present century, our life, our egoism”, he wrote that everything in it is “myth and symbol”. The French word le chagrin itself can be translated as "shagreen" (shagreen skin), but it has a homonym hardly unknown to Balzac: le chagrin - "sorrow, grief." And this is important: the fantastic, almighty pebbled skin, having given the hero the freedom from poverty, actually caused even more grief. It destroyed the ability for creative daring, the desire to enjoy life, the feeling of compassion that unites a person with his own kind, destroyed, in the end, the spirituality of the one who possesses it. That is why Balzac forced the wealthy banker Tailfer, having committed a murder, to be one of the first to greet Raphael de Valentin with the words: “You are ours. The words: "The French are equal before the law" - henceforth for him the lie with which the charter begins. He will not obey the laws, but the laws will obey him.” These words really contain the "formula" of the life of nineteenth-century France. Depicting the rebirth of Raphael de Valentin after receiving millions, Balzac, using the conventions allowed in the philosophical genre, creates an almost fantastic picture of the existence of a man who has become a servant of his wealth, turned into an automaton. The combination of philosophical fantasy and the depiction of reality in the forms of life itself constitutes the artistic specificity of the story. Linking the life of his hero with fantastic shagreen skin, Balzac, for example, describes with medical accuracy the physical suffering of Raphael, who is ill with tuberculosis. In Shagreen Skin, Balzac presents a fantastic event as the quintessence of the laws of his time and, with its help, discovers the main social engine of society - monetary interest, which destroys the individual. This goal is also served by the antithesis of two female images - Polina, who was the embodiment of a feeling of kindness, selfless love, and Theodora, in the image of this heroine, the soullessness inherent in society, narcissism, ambition, vanity and deadly boredom, created by the world of money, which can give everything, are emphasized. except for life and a loving human heart. One of the important figures of the story is the antiquary, who reveals to Raphael "the secret of human life." According to him, and they reflect the judgments of Balzac, which will be directly embodied in his novels, human life can be defined by the verbs "to wish", "to be able" and "to know". “Wishing burns us,” he says, “and being able destroys us, but knowing gives our weak body the opportunity to remain forever in a calm state.” In a state of "desire" are all young ambitious people, scientists and poets - Rastignac, Chardon, Séchard, Valentin; only those who have a strong will and know how to adapt to a society where everything is for sale and everything is bought achieve the state of “to be able”. Only one Rastignac himself becomes a minister, a peer, marries the heiress of millions. Chardon temporarily manages to achieve what he wants with the help of the fugitive convict Vautrin, Raphael de Valentin receives a destructive, but omnipotent shagreen skin, which acts like Vautrin: it makes it possible to partake in the benefits of society, but for this it requires humility and life. In a state of "know" are those who, despising the suffering of others, managed to acquire millions - this is the antiquary and usurer Gobsek himself. They have turned into servants of their treasures, into people like automata: the automatic repetition of their thoughts and actions is emphasized by the author. If, like the old Baron Nusingen, they suddenly find themselves obsessed with desires that are not related to the accumulation of money (the passion for the courtesan Esther is the novel “The Splendor and Poverty of the Courtesans” (“Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes”), then they become figures both sinister and comic, because out of their social role.
Honore de Balzac
Unknown masterpiece
I. Gillette
Late in 1612, on a cold December morning, a young man, very lightly dressed, was pacing up and down past the door of a house in the Rue des Grandes Augustins, in Paris. Having walked so much, like an indecisive lover who does not dare to appear before the first beloved in his life, no matter how accessible she may be, the young man finally stepped over the threshold of the door and asked if the master Francois Porbus was in. Having received an affirmative answer from the old woman who was sweeping the canopy, the young man began to slowly rise, stopping at each step, just like a new courtier, preoccupied with the thought of what kind of reception the king would give him. Climbing up the spiral staircase, the young man stood on the landing, still not daring to touch the fancy hammer that adorned the door of the workshop, where, probably, the painter of Henry IV, forgotten by Marie Medici for the sake of Rubens, was working at that hour. The young man experienced that strong feeling that must have made the hearts of great artists beat when, full of youthful fervor and love for art, they approached a man of genius or a great work. In human feelings there is a time for the first flowering, generated by noble impulses, gradually weakening, when happiness becomes only a memory, and glory a lie. Among the short-lived agitations of the heart, nothing resembles love so much as the young passion of the artist, who tastes the first wonderful torments on the path of glory and misfortune - a passion full of courage and timidity, vague faith and inevitable disappointments. The one who, during the years of lack of money and the first creative ideas, did not feel trepidation when meeting a great master, will always lack one string in his soul, some kind of brush stroke, some kind of feeling in creativity, some elusive poetic shade. Some self-satisfied braggarts, who too soon believed in their future, seem smart people only to fools. In this respect, everything spoke in favor of the unknown young man, if talent is measured by those manifestations of initial timidity, by that inexplicable shyness that people created for fame easily lose when constantly revolving in the field of art, just as beautiful women lose their timidity by constantly practicing coquetry. . The habit of success drowns out doubts, and modesty is, perhaps, one of the types of doubt.
Dejected by need and surprised at this moment by his own audacity, the poor newcomer would not have dared to enter the artist, to whom we owe a beautiful portrait of Henry IV, if an unexpected opportunity had not come to the rescue. An old man came up the stairs. From his strange costume, from his magnificent lace collar, from his important, confident gait, the young man guessed that this was either a patron or a friend of the master, and, taking a step back to make way for him, he began to examine him with curiosity, in the hope of finding in him the kindness of an artist or the kindness characteristic of art lovers - but in the face of the old man there was something diabolical and something else elusive, peculiar, so attractive to the artist. Imagine a high, prominent, receding forehead hanging over a small, flat, upturned nose, like that of Rabelais or Socrates; lips mocking and wrinkled; short, haughtily raised chin; gray pointed beard; green, the color of sea water, eyes that seemed faded with age, but, judging by the mother-of-pearl tints of protein, were still sometimes capable of throwing a magnetic glance in a moment of anger or delight. However, this face seemed faded not so much from old age, but from those thoughts that wear out both soul and body. Eyelashes had already fallen out, and sparse hairs were barely noticeable on the superciliary arches. Place this head against a frail and weak body, frame it with lace, shining white and striking in the fineness of the workmanship, throw a heavy gold chain over the old man's black coat, and you will get an imperfect image of this person, to whom the weak lighting of the stairs gave a fantastic shade. You would say that this is a Rembrandt portrait, leaving its frame and silently moving in the semi-darkness, so beloved by the great artist. The old man cast a penetrating glance at the young man, knocked three times, and said to a sickly man in his forties who looked to open the door.
