Part 36 (1/2)
XVI. THE PORTRAIT OF A POPE
Two or three days later Caesar met the Spaniard Cortes in the Piazza Colonna. They bowed. The thin, sour-looking painter was walking with a beardless young German, red and snub-nosed. This young man was a painter too, Cortes said; he wore a green hat with a c.o.c.k's feather, a blue cape, thick eyegla.s.ses, big boots, and had a certain air of being a blond Chinaman.
”Would you like to come to the Doria gallery with us?” asked Cortes.
”What is there to see there?”
”A stupendous portrait by Velazquez.”
”I warn you that I know nothing about pictures.”
”n.o.body does,” Cortes declared roundly. ”Everybody says what he thinks.”
”Is the gallery near here?”
”Yes, just a step.”
In company with Cortes and the German with the green hat with the c.o.c.k's feather, Caesar went to the Piazza del Collegio Romano, where the Doria palace is. They saw a lot of pictures which didn't seem any better to Caesar than those in the antique shops and the p.a.w.nbrokers', but which drew learned commentaries from the German. Then Cortes took them to a cabinet hung in green and lighted by a skylight. There was nothing to be seen in the cabinet except the portrait of the Pope. In order that people might look at it comfortably, a sofa had been installed facing it.
”Is this the Velazquez portrait?” asked Caesar.
”This is it.”
Caesar looked at it carefully. ”That man had eaten and drunk well before his portrait was painted,” said Caesar; ”his face is congested.”
”It is extraordinary!” exclaimed Cortes. ”It is something to see, the way this is done. What boldness! Everything is red, the cape, the cap, the curtains in the background.... What a man!”
The German aired his opinions in his own language, and took out a notebook and pencil and wrote some notes.
”What sort of man was this?” asked Caesar, whom the technical side of painting did not preoccupy, as it did Cortes.
”They say he was a dull man, who lived under a woman's domination.”
”The great thing is,” murmured Caesar, ”how the painter has left him here alive. It seems as if we had come in here to salute him, and he was waiting for us to speak. Those clear eyes are questioning us. It is curious.”
”Not curious,” exclaimed Cortes, ”but admirable.”
”For me it is more curious than admirable. There is something brutal in this Pope; through his grey beard, which is so thin, you can see his projecting chin. The good gentleman was of a marked prognathism, a type of degeneration, indifference, intellectual torpor, and nevertheless, he reached the top. Perhaps in the Church it's the same as in water, only corks float.”
_LEGEND AND HISTORY_
Caesar went out of the cabinet, leaving the German and Cortes seated on the sofa, absorbed in the picture; he looked at various paintings in the gallery, went back, and sat down, beside the artists.
”This portrait,” he said presently, ”is like history by the side of legend. All the other paintings in the gallery are legend, 'folk-lore,'