As Above, So Below Page 29

“See what your pachter sees.”

  “Objects are alive.”

  And—Peter delivered this one in a challenging tone—“The world is a parable.”

  “You mean the painting is a parable, don’t you, Master Bruegel?” said Bengt, who enjoyed the give-and-take of discussion.

  “That goes without saying,” answered Peter. “No, I said the world is a parable. God made the world, and he made it a parable. The world’s like God’s painting.”

  “If the world’s a painting, then who commissioned it?” demanded Bengt.

  “You’re the patron, the pachter, and the paint,” said Peter. “The Trinity.”

  “How so the paint?” asked Bengt.

  “The red is your blood, the black your bile, the yellow your choler, and the cool green is your phlegm.”

  The lessons and the logic-chopping word games mystified Mayken a little, and once Peter was through using her as a model, she began spending a bit less time in the studio. And a good thing too, as life in the Coecke house was going on as usual and her mother truly had abandoned all control over the finances.

  So Mayken learned how to be a businesswoman. She gave Mienemeuie money for shopping, collected the fees from her mother’s patrons, paid the taxman his share of what they earned, and so on and so on. Things were tighter than she’d ever realized—indeed the Coecke workshop was not so far removed from bankruptcy. No wonder mother had been so keen to have Peter join the family.

  Every few months Jerome Cock would send down some undocumented payments for his sales of Peter’s engravings, and Peter mentioned wondering if he might be underpaid. So Mayken got Jerome to give them a proper accounting, and ended up getting him a bit more money than before, which helped.

  The one member of the household who doubted Mayken’s acumen was old Mienemeuie. The day came when she tried to pooh-pooh Mayken’s decisions and to go around her to her mother, but old Mayken stood solidly behind her daughter.

  “Let her make her own mistakes,” said mother. “They’ll never be as bad as mine.”

  Before long Peter was finished with the Flight into Egypt, with Mary/Mayken on a donkey and Joseph/Peter starting down the slope ahead of her, his head and face covered by a hat. The distant prospects of the picture showed a lovely, sunny river landscape. But for now, Joseph and Mary were heading down into a dark canyon they’d have to traverse before reaching their Promised Land. Mayken gasped when she saw the composition, so perfectly did it seem to express their situation. In the end all would be well between her and Peter, she felt sure of it—but in the meantime there were their financial problems, the growing political unrest of the Low Lands, and the lingering memories of her delirious affair with Williblad. Mayken still felt just a bit unsure of her love for Peter. Yes, the love was a fine big pumpkin by now, but why couldn’t it be a bright thorny rose to pierce her heart?

  Discussing his Flight into Egypt with her, Peter chose not to explore the meaning of the dark canyon. Instead he talked about a toppled pagan idol he’d painted in; it was sticking out from a little wooden shrine beside the path the painted couple trod. “That’s the Cardinal,” remarked Peter, pointing out the fallen idol with the end of his brush. “Sometimes a painting makes things so. Granvelle won’t be in the Low Lands much longer.”

  Not wanting to see his tormentor Granvelle again himself—and perhaps not wanting to risk a tongue-lashing about the idol—Peter had Bengt deliver the panel to the Cardinal. Bengt reported that Granvelle had paid the remainder of the fee with barely a glance at the picture. Evidently the Primate had other things on his mind.

  Indeed, the Low Lands were in great ferment. Politics was all that anyone talked about in the markets. The high nobles had presented King Philip with a petition that he lighten his edicts against heresy and end the slaughter of his citizens.

  Meanwhile, the money from the final sale of the painting came in handy, though Mayken felt the overall price had been too low. She’d taken it upon herself to visit the Brussels Schilderspand to get an idea of the going prices for paintings the size and quality of Peter’s. She urged him to let her help him negotiate his fees from now on, and he gladly agreed.

  Politics and finances interested Peter much less than what he could see and think and paint. Mayken got her chance to serve as the negotiator for his next commission, which was to be his largest panel yet, done for Jonghelinck, who had been exceedingly pleased with his Tower of Babel.

  The new picture was to be a Bearing of the Cross, a scene of Christ carrying his cross, but drawn as a Flemish crowd scene. It was a composition that had been done numerous times by other Flemish painters, indeed Jonghelinck owned a similar scene by Herri met de Bles. Jonghelinck paid a visit to Brussels specifically to ask Peter to do something like it. When he proposed a sum to Peter, Peter said neither yes nor no, but asked him to return on the morrow so he could discuss the offer with his manager, his Mayken.

  As they discussed the painting that evening, Peter paced around his fine big attic studio with its many windows, telling Mayken that he was set upon making the biggest and best Flemish Bearing of the Cross yet, the one that would finish off this particular genre for once and for all. It touched her to see how high he set his sights. She fully believed he could attain his ambitions, and she wanted to see him properly paid. That night Mayken did some figuring from the going rates and from her estimates of the costs of making the work Peter wanted—and concluded that Jonghelinck should triple the figure.

  To Peter’s surprise, Jonghelinck accepted the counteroffer. His elation was extreme. Peter and Bengt ran out and purchased a huge, well-aged oak panel, the largest they could find, five feet by four feet in size. And now, before starting, he wanted to make up a fresh batch of paints. He insisted that Mayken be in on this. “So you can teach our sons and daughters some day,” he reminded her. Mayken was getting to like this idea. The talk of their descendents had changed from being a burden to being a pleasant prospect. More workers to fill the accounts of the studio! And, truly, how sweet it would be to see a child who was half Mayken and half Peter.

  The trade secrets of making paints were quite new to Mayken. Her father had died too young to teach her, and her mother had never had the temperament for fiddling with such alchemical processes. Instead, the old Mayken bought the paints for her miniatures ready-mixed from her artist friend Anne Smijters, who had a busy studio just a few streets away. Peter told Mayken they’d make pigments of white, yellow, black, green, blue, and red.

  For the white and yellow, Peter, Bengt, and Mayken refurbished Master Coecke’s “stack” for making white lead. The stack, abandoned for years now, consisted of a dozen clay pots arranged beneath the midden heap beside the shed in the corner of the garden. Some were cracked, and Peter replaced them. He poured a few inches of apple vinegar in each of the pots, and then he had Bengt and Mayken put a number of beaten sheets of lead into each vessel. The sheets, pounded to the thinness of paper, were separated by pebbles so that the vinegar would touch all the surfaces. They covered the stack of pots back up with rotting compost and household dung. Waf became so interested in this process that they put a fence around the stack to keep him from rolling in it or digging it up.

  According to Peter, the decay of the offal released a fire element, which over the period of a few weeks would combine with the fire within lead and vinegar to turn the earthen elements of lead into an air element of fine, flaking white. Though his schooling had been quite brief, Peter seemed to have soaked up an uncanny ability to mirror the workings of the scholastic mind. Mayken chaffed him about it a little in private, asking him which element made his penis rise.

  In any case, the point of the stack was that, washed and ground, the white lead would serve as the finest kind of white pigment, far superior in durability to marble dust or to ground egg shells. And once you had the white lead, you could heat part of it in a crucible, transmuting it into a fine yellow pigment called massicot.

  “For the black we need bone,” said
Peter when the stack was done. “Or better yet, ivory.” Something jogged loose in Mayken’s memory. She ran and found a charred old walrus tusk from one of the basement closets; she’d occasionally played with the talismanic object as a girl, thinking of it as some eldritch northern Queen’s scepter. Walrus tusk was, said Peter, the best possible source of black pigment. They heated the tusk over a fire, astonished by its fishy stench, and then scraped off a quantity of the blackened ivory.

  “Now for the colors,” said the busy Peter on the next day. “The water and air of our parable world.” He produced a sack of special rocks: crumbly nuggets of azurite and malachite in shades of blue and green. The way to get the pigments from the ore was a process called levigation. Peter had Bengt crush the rocks and told Mayken to shake them up with water, the blue ore in one flask and the green in the other. The earthy dross settled to the bottoms of the flasks while the colorful powders swirled about in the fluid. Mayken liked this part, the dust in the water was pretty. They poured off the bright waters and levigated the mixtures again. The results were two heaps of fine, powdery pigment that were set out in the sunlight to dry.

  Finally, for his red, Peter used a vermilion cinnabar that Hans Franckert had imported from Austria. This ore was said to be a blend of mercury and sulfur; it was a terribly dangerous substance with a lethal affinity for the blood humor; artists who carelessly inhaled cinnabar dust had been known to die within months: yellow, wizened, and smelling of urine. Peter implored Mayken to never handle the cinnabar herself; and he insisted that Bengt wrap a triple kerchief around his face before grinding it up on a table in the garden.

  Rather than letting the powdered pigments wait, Peter deemed it better to mix them up into finished paint right away. They heated a mixture of balsamic turpentine with walnut oil and then melted a block of beeswax into the liquid. They split the smooth, sticky medium among four pots and folded in the bright dusts. And then, finally, there were four little vessels of paint: a black, a green, a blue, and a red, each with a layer of oil to cover it. Frankly, Mayken wondered if she could remember every step. But she knew she’d have many chances to see it all again. It was a little odd to think of her whole future life being already planned out for her.

  “Remember, Mayken,” said Peter, “white, yellow, and red are poisonous, while black, green, and blue are safe. It’s the fire element that’s deadly.” Indeed, thought Mayken with a tiny inward sigh. The fire is what damages your heart. Better of course to be a safe old wife, working with water and earth.

  While all the paint-making had been going on, Bengt had also been sanding Peter’s new panel for him. Peter brushed the panel with a mixture of plaster and horse-hoof glue, giving it a firm white surface. And then he was ready to start populating it.

  In these early stages of the picture, Peter worked with pencil and paper, first getting his pachters right, and then sketching them onto the panel. Just for the fun of it, Mayken took her own paper and began practicing drawing along with Bengt. But, even though her parents were artists, she didn’t have the touch. While the lines sprang into life from Bengt’s long, pale fingers, Mayken’s drawings came out crooked and stiff. Peter encouraged her anyway, but soon she gave it up.

  One day, to postpone having to go downstairs and work on the business accounts, she hit on the idea of helping Peter make up stories about the characters he drew. As Peter said, the more you knew about the pachters’ lives, the better you could draw them. And Mayken was better than he at imagining other people’s lives and minds.

  So for the next few weeks, Mayken would go up to the studio in the morning and spend some time with Peter and Bengt telling stories about the people they drew. Here was a mounted soldier with two nose-holes in a face like an empty skull; Mayken said his family had died of leprosy and he’d gone into the army as a boy, sending part of his pay to cover the feeding of a single cow that he’d inherited on a cousin’s farm, but that his cousin had long since butchered and eaten the cow without telling him. A workman with a shovel trudged along with four other workmen, one of them wearing a tight red hat with flaps. Mayken said they’d dug a tulip garden that afternoon for a lady who hadn’t paid them, and now were trying to get good spots to watch the Crucifixion, with the hope of meeting someone there to give them more work, but it was hard to make plans as the man in the tight red hat was deaf from scarlet fever. A man ran across the scene with a heavy sack over his shoulder; Mayken said the sack was full of spoiled grain the man had stolen to feed his sick son Wim, who was home alone because his wife had followed Mary Magdalene to the Sermon on the Mount and had never come home, and that the man had been too busy with his son to listen to the gossip of the streets, so he was surprised to see Jesus here in the procession. Over by the fallen Christ and his cross, a fat man in chain mail blew a long, curving horn; Mayken said he liked to practice blowing it a lot during the daytime and even at night, and a neighbor had threatened to kill him, but the horn blower was friends with the local Inquisitor, and he’d had the complaining neighbor burned as a heretic. In front of him was a cart with the two thieves in it; one thief made confession to a sly, simian monk; the other thief stared white-faced into the heavens. Mayken said the confessing man had robbed and killed six merchants, and the staring man had murdered his mother, but that when hanging on their crosses, it would be the staring man who turned out to be the good thief, the one who asked the Lord to save him. The wheels of their cart were covered in mud, and the draft horse was knee-deep in water, his name was Paard, and he liked nothing better than rolling on his back in a sunny meadow, but he wasn’t going to be doing that today.

  In the foreground were a husband and wife struggling with three soldiers and a bald old Pharisee. The Pharisee had the husband by one arm, pulling him towards the fallen Christ. Two of the soldiers were pushing and pulling the husband as well, they wanted him to help carry the cross. The wife was hanging on to the husband. The third soldier, who wore striped tights, was threatening the wife with a pike. Her jaw was set and her husband’s feet were braced.

  “Put a rosary at her waist,” said Mayken. “She says novenas, but she doesn’t want her husband to help the Lord. And have the husband be looking to her for help. She’s stronger than him.”

  The weeks turned into months before all of Peter’s figures were sketched in. Mayken went up to the studio less and less often. There were too many people, too much to think about. How could Peter stay focused upon his little world for so long? Meanwhile Bengt harvested the white lead, cooked some of it into yellow massicot, and started a fresh batch in the stack. Finally the drawing was done. For the last two figures in the picture, Peter had drawn a skulking, anguished Judas, and beside Judas he had set a self-portrait of himself in profile, Peter standing there with his hands folded, calm and noble, gazing at the fallen little Christ in the center of the scene.

  It was all quite lovely, but Mayken found that juggling the family finances interested her more—perhaps because this work was all hers. Mother had recently landed another tapestry commission, and to bring the money in faster, Mayken hit on the notion of patching together some of their old tapestry cartoons and having another studio take over some of the fabrication. Peter’s advance from Jonghelinck was used up by now, and it was a daily balancing act to keep the House of Coecke solvent.

  Even though she wanted Peter to finish his picture and get paid, Mayken would perhaps have liked it better if he’d spent more time in bed with her in the mornings. These days, no sooner was he awake, than he was running up the stairs to his studio.

  “Come watch me start the underpainting,” urged Peter. “That’s worth knowing about too.” So again Mayken started spending a bit of time in the studio each morning. It was in fact the one way to be sure she saw her husband before dinnertime. Peter dipped out bits of the red and the yellow, the white and the black, made up some shades of ocher, and thinned them with a mixture of egg and walnut oil. Inch by inch he went across the panel, creating a delicate underpainting in li
ght tones that still let the drawing show through. And when, a week or two later, this was done, he went over the picture again, highlighting the bright spots with white lead. The intricacy of the process staggered Mayken. Her mother’s miniatures took nothing like so long. But Peter seemed never to weary of his labors and, considering all that he set himself to do, he worked rapidly. Each detail of his picture seemed endlessly capable of arousing his interest.

  In the afternoons Peter would quit work, wash himself off, and Mayken would take him and Waf out to walk the streets of Brussels. But even outdoors, Peter’s attention seemed, more often than not, to be up in the fourth-floor studio with his little characters. His obsession with his work was beginning to make her jealous.

  The town was in a ferment of gossip about whether the Foreigner might accede to the nobles’ petition to soften the strictures against heresy. More and more people had become openly Calvinist. And then, in March of 1564, the word came out that Cardinal Granvelle was leaving. At King Philip’s request, the Cardinal was to visit his mother in France for an indefinitely long period of time. People imagined that now King Philip would weaken his edicts and come to more reasonable terms with the citizenry of the Low Lands. Little did they know that the King was but biding his time, and that his persecutions would double and redouble in savagery over the years to come. But for a few happy months, the citizens could dream that their freedom was at hand.

  The news of Granvelle’s dismissal came out just at the start of Carnival, and the revelry was wild and unrestrained. Franckert and Hennie came down from Antwerp to visit; Mayken put them up in an extra room that was squeezed in on the second floor between her mother’s bedroom and studio. Some wag had painted “For Immediate Sale” on the door of Granvelle’s palace. Many dressed up like priests and cardinals for the riotous masking. Peter, the Maykens, and what seemed like half of Brussels were invited to a great celebration at William the Sly’s.