Ali Smith - How to be both

But these are mere mundane pleasures — I’m tempted to hire a small boy, stand him on a table and have him shout those words MERE MUNDANE PLEASURES — beside the thing that happens when the life of the picture itself steps beyond the frame.

Cause then it does 2 opposing things at once.

The one is, it lets the world be seen and understood.

The other is, it unchains the eyes and the lives of those who see it and gives them a moment of freedom, from its world and from their world both.

And I wasn’t slave to this work for much longer myself cause when I neared the finish of the month of March it was the month of March, near New Year: one day all the assistants and the workshop painters were standing in a huddle in the middle of the room: there was passionate talk, it was about the infidel uprising, I reckoned from up on the scaffolding (cause there’d been an uprising for more food and money among the field workers, 10 men beaten cause of the actions of 1 man, and rumour that some of the 10 were near death and that the 1 who organized the rising was already cut in pieces).

But no, the talk was nothing to do with infidels: what they were arguing so passionate about down there was their latest request to Borse for better pay.

Master Francescho! the pickpocket shouted up the side of the scaffolding.

Ercole! I shouted back down without turning.

(I was touching up the Graces.)

Let us sign your name, the pickpocket shouted up, to this petition alongside ours!

No! I shouted down

cause they had petitioned twice for more money already and the second time, instead of giving them more, Borse had had them all (me too) presented with his medal, the one with his head on one side, Justice on the other and the words on it: haec te unum: you and she are one.

It was a pretty medal and had an appearance of value, but Borse had had so many given out all over town (and not just here but in his other towns too) that they fetched very little at market.

But Borse was well known for his generosity: didn’t he pay his favoured musicians handsomely? Didn’t he cover Cosmo in precious stones?

True, so far I’d been paid the same rate as the others, but it was an oversight, I knew.

I intended to write to the Marquis directly and point out the oversight.

Cause I knew myself exceptional (the only painter here not working to Cosmo’s cartoons, the only one brought in from outside beyond the court workshop): and when the wrong money first came I had asked the Falcon to intercede: but the Falcon had looked at me, doleful.

Did you not get your medal, then? he said,

by which I knew he had no power in this matter.

The Falcon had liked his St Giorgio a lot: I could see he liked himself as a man of action as well as a poet cause he’d flushed up red to the back of his ears.

But he’d shaken his head at the madmen from the madhouse that I’d painted running behind the horses and donkeys as if part themselves of the palio, their straitjacket tabs flying out behind them: he’d shaken his head again at the distant view of the Marquis’s hunt — the Marquis and all his men on horseback heading straight towards the edge of the abyss, a dog looking coolly down into it (the abyss I’d made by painting a crack in the foreground architecture, a perspective I took great pride in).

One picture I’d made in particular made the Falcon turn pale.

Here, he was saying. No. This can’t stay. You have to change it.

He was pointing at the first decan for March, at the place where he’d asked for a powerful guardian man and I’d painted him one, in the shape of an infidel.

Something like this is bad enough as it is, the Falcon was saying. Bad enough by itself. And on top of this you ask me to go to him to get you more money ? Francescho. Can’t you see? Haven’t you eyes? He’ll have you whipped. And if I ask for more money he’ll have me whipped too. No, no, no. It’s got to come off. Cut it out. Start again. Redo it.

I cowered inside my skin: I was foolish, I’d end up unpaid and dismissed and be poor for a year: I’d never get work at the court again and I was badly out of pocket cause the golds and the blues had cost half a year’s money: so I readied myself to ask the Falcon, what would he like me to paint there instead?

But when I came to speak, instead of any of these words I heard myself say only

no.

The Falcon next to me gave a little start.

Francescho. Redo it, he said again.

I shook my head.

No.

That can’t stay either, he was saying pointing at the Graces up in the Venus space. That Grace there. Make her lighter. Far too dark.

I had given the Graces fashionable hairstyles: I had given them fleeting bodily resemblances, Ginevra and Agnola both facing, Isotta with her back to us: I had painted them holding apples and painted some Vs in 2 spindly trees to catch and repeat the shape of the place on the facing Graces where all human life and much pleasure originates: I had placed 2 birds in each spindly tree: everything rhythmic: even the apples and breasts were resemblances: it was the Grace I’d made like Isotta that had caught his eye: but even she, beautiful as she was, barely held his eye cause I saw that he couldn’t not look, kept looking again and again to the infidel in his white work rags in the space of the best blue.

Then — a miracle — something shifted in the Falcon, changed in the way he stood beside me.

I saw him shake his head again but in a different way.

He called for more light.

More light came.

He put his hands round his face.

When he took his hands away I saw that the Falcon was laughing.

Such audacity. Well. It’s true, you’ve done exactly what I asked you, he said. Though I didn’t ask for such beauty. Well, let’s see. I’ll, I don’t know, I’ll fix it. I’ll redirect him to the figure of the old man here bending the knee to him like he wanted. Borse giving out justice to an aging infidel.

Thank you, Mr de Prisciano, I said.

But, in turn, do me a couple of kindnesses, Francescho, the Falcon said. Make the bending man a shade darker at the skin to show the new Duke’s justice as bigger than any expectation. But I’m warning you. Don’t be any more of a fool. Francescho. Do you hear? And lighten up the colour of that Grace, the one with her back to us. And we might, we just might, get away with it.

Get away with it : as if I had planned a hidden satire or a sedition: but in all honesty, when I looked at my own pictures they surprised even me with their knowledge: cause at the same time as I’d been painting these questioning things I had been telling myself that the Marquis would be just, he’d naturally know and honour my worth and reward me properly for it, of course he would, even if I pictured him and his hunt all clipclopping as if blind towards a crevasse: cause the life of painting and making is a matter of double knowledge so that your own hands will reveal a world to you to which your mind’s eye, your conscious eye, is often blind.

The Falcon was shaking his head at the infidel: he was no longer laughing: his mouth fell open: he put his hand to his mouth.

And if he asks anything, he said with his hand still over his mouth, I’ll tell him, I don’t know, I’ll say it’s, it’s –

A figure from the French Romances, I said.

A figure from a little-known French Romance, the Falcon said. One he’d never admit to not knowing. Since we all know how well he knows them all.

Then he’d looked me in the eyes.

But I can’t get you any more money, Francescho, he said. Don’t ask me again.

Well then, I’d write and ask myself, direct, I thought as the Falcon descended the scaffolding: I did not need an interceder.