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