Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

As he nears the museum entrance he’s back in the Renaissance, spotting names he remembers from Mediterranean shoreleaves: Lotto, Tintoretto, Titian. One big canvas looks familiar, although the artist’s name — FRANCESCO BASSANO, 1549–1592—doesn’t ring any bells. AUTUMN , it’s called: a group of rustics harvesting apples and stomping grapes beneath the eerie green light of an overcast sky. Curtis isn’t sure what about it caught his attention, unless maybe it’s the thunderbolt-brandishing centaur bounding through the distant clouds, which reminds him a little of the bearded gods on the map in the lobby. Studying the canvas, he spends a moment trying to figure out whether he saw the real one in Italy before he remembers that this is the real one.

He’s looking at the exhibit’s oldest piece, a portrait of an unsmiling merchant from 1436, when Veronica breezes in. Just the sight of her puts him on edge. The shuteye she caught on the couch last night hasn’t done much for her: even from across the room her eyes are hooded in blue. Her movements seem loose, marionettelike, as if she’s held up by something invisible outside herself, as if each step she takes is an arrested collapse. Her feet brush the blond parquet as she glides toward him.

Veronica’s decked out in white running shoes and a lavender jenny-from-the-block tracksuit that she doesn’t quite have the body to pull off; the outfit is at serious odds with her teased-out hair and insomniac pallor. Her wide smile is probably intended to be disarming, but it’s straying into cymbal-playing-monkey territory and has pretty much the opposite effect.

She nods at the portrait of the merchant as she strolls up. They don’t make ’em like that no more, eh? she says.

Curtis glances back at the painting. The merchant’s eyes are sharp in its smoky halflight, staring at him across five and a half centuries. That’s the truth, he says. Looks like it could’ve been taken with a camera.

It was, Veronica says.

Curtis blinks, looks at her, tracks her eyes back to the oak panel. There are small cracks in the paint on the merchant’s nose and forehead. Say again? he says.

It was taken with a camera. As in camera obscura, as in a darkened room for the projection of images. I mean, it is a painting, obviously. In the Fifteenth Century, there was no way to chemically fix an image. Van Eyck projected the sitter onto the panel with some kind of optical device, and then he painted over the projection.

Veronica brushes past Curtis toward the wall, sweeping her hand over the portrait’s face like she’s tagging it with an invisible spraycan. Look how he’s framed, she says. Look how he’s lit. Look at that softness, those shadows. You see that in Leonardo’s sfumato , then later in Giorgione, Hals, Rembrandt. Canaletto and Vermeer, too, but those guys came later; they had fancy glass lenses. Van Eyck had to make do with a concave mirror. But the basic approach is the same. You see how the tonal grading opens the figure’s dimensions and gives the painting depth? That’s a total giveaway. You take a look at a Spanish or Sienese painting from the same period, it’ll be as flat and closed-off as the king of clubs.

What, Curtis says, are you talking about?

You haven’t heard about this? All the big guys, all the marquee names — van Eyck, Leonardo, Giorgione, Raphael, Holbein, Caravaggio — they all used optical devices. This is old news, man. This was on 60 Minutes like a year ago.

Curtis looks at her, irritated, and then looks at the merchant again. The portrait’s eyes seem to follow him through the room.

Veronica is backing into the gallery, turning girlishly on the ball of her foot. No optics in Titian or Tintoretto, she says, gesturing at the walls. But you can still see the influence of the optical style. Dark backgrounds? That’s from optics. Images projected in a camera obscura always have dark backgrounds. But holy shit, the van Dyck? The ruffles on that collar, are you kidding? Definitely optics. The Lotto, too, although he hides it pretty well. And check out the Pontormo. Look how fucked his proportions are. He used the camera obscura to nail down Mary’s face and hands, the baby Jesus’s head and arm. The rest of the painting’s on a different planet. The hands and the faces don’t fit the bodies. If that Mary were to crawl down from the canvas she’d look like a power forward for the NBA. Those arms are like four feet long.

She grabs Curtis’s elbow and tugs him into the next room, talking loud, pointing. A young couple in matching sweatshirts and khakis is standing next to the wolfhound as they round the corner. Their brows are furrowed in disapproval, like this is the Sistine Chapel or something. Curtis gives them a mind-your-own-business glare.

Let me see if I’m getting this, he says. You’re telling me all this stuff was—

Don’t say traced. Traced sounds dismissive. There’s a lot more to it than that. You’ve got to get the tonal values right, and the colors. It’s not easy. It’s not like these guys were cheating. You gotta remember, we’re talking about the Dark Ages here. Painting didn’t exist as some kind of noble alternative to photography like it does today, expressive of some ineffable human truth or whatever. It was just the only means these people had of recording images. Nobody cared whether van Eyck captured his subject’s individual essence: they had no concept of individual essences. They just wanted to know if the fucking thing looked like Uncle Hubrecht or not.

Veronica slows her stride. Her eyes pass from painting to painting. I will never understand, she says, why people lose their shit over this. I mean, so what if they used optics? Why do we have to make these guys out to be superheroes? I was at Columbia when Hockney first started talking about this stuff, and believe me, nobody wanted to hear it. They were all about pure theory: Bataille, Derrida, Lacan. Nobody cared how paintings were actually done. You’d make an argument based on science, on methods, on empirical observations, and they’d look at you like you’d just come to fix the color copier or something. It’s not that they didn’t believe it. They just didn’t see the point.

She’s losing steam, getting distracted. Tension steals back into her shoulders, her face. I forgot that, Curtis says. That you studied art.

Art history, she says. Not art. Completely different. As I quickly found out.

They walk a few paces in silence. Veronica stares at the parquet, lost in thought. Curtis walks beside her, eyeing the walls. He’d been imagining the paintings talking to her, pouring out their secrets in a language he couldn’t understand, or even hear. Now that she’s not looking, they seem to go dark one by one, like tenement windows.

You come down here a lot? he says. To the museum?

She laughs, looks up. I’ve been in the casino every night for a week, she says. Six hours a night, hundred bucks a hand minimum. I’ve racked up so many comps that they’re about to name one of the towers after me. I’m getting sick from eating ossobuco and foie gras at every meal. So I figure, free museum tickets? Sure, why not? I like it here. It’s quiet. It’s a nice place to hide.

Hide from who?

She smiles at that, shakes her head. I just remembered, she says. I haven’t eaten anything since this morning. You want lunch? I got vouchers out the wazoo.

I ate, but I’ll tag along. You feel safe walking around out there?

She grins — a little crazy — and eases closer as they walk. She’s maybe a half-inch taller than he is. Well, she says, you’re gonna protect me. Right?

He stops. She steps around, turns to face him. He searches her expression for a tell — a clue that she’s just opening up to reel him in — but even as he does it he knows that it’s hopeless, that he’s outclassed. If she’s playing him, then he’s going to get played. It’s the only move he’s got.