But before the eye followed that gesture, what was it to make of the two women with Christ, the one standing in what might almost have been an attitude of anger over the kneeling figure, one hand raised as if in rhetorical condemnation, while the other, reaching bare from a servant’s smock, pointed downward at the wine-pots. The other woman, kneeling and seeming almost to protect her Lord, was small, and beneath a curious enveloping cap upon her head her expression was sweet with adoration. Around the head of Christ was a radiance, not strongly emphasized, and otherwise the figure was unremarkable, almost humble.
Following Judas’s gesture the eye moves toward the right-hand panel. The figures here might be taken for wedding guests; a knightly figure, one eye obliterated by a bandage, wears a sword but has a warning finger at its lips, as if cautioning to silence; his companion is a lady of great but cold beauty. If any connoisseur were so pernickety as to extend a string from the pointing finger of Judas to its termination in this picture, it would strike a wealthy merchant and his wife, apparently concerned only with themselves; the male figure carries a heavy purse at his girdle. The physician, somewhat apart, stands with his lancet ready in his hand, ready to let blood from any of the marriage group, all of whom are included in the scope of his penetrating, rodent eyes. But if these are wedding guests, surely those others in the background must be beggars at the feast—that rabble of children with twisted, ugly, hungry faces. They are not looking toward the marriage scene, but are concentrated on one of their number who is gouging the eye from a cat with a sharp stone. In this panel the background is markedly desolate, as compared with the landscape elsewhere.
A strange picture, and the experts were happy to sink their learned teeth into it and worry it to some sort of satisfactory interpretation or attribution.
It was in vain that Colonel Osmotherley reminded them that their task was to say what should be done with the picture, and not to decide beyond question who had painted it, or what its curious assemblage of elements might mean. Schlichte-Martin said that he did not think it could ever have been intended for a Christian church; the relegation of the Saviour to a place on a side wing made it wholly unacceptable. Knüpfer wanted to know why the dwarf was in armour; of course, everyone had seen ceremonial armour that had been made for dwarfs, but why was this dwarf wearing it to hold pencils, and had anybody noticed how much the dwarf looked like Drollig Hansel? (Ross nodded vigorously at this.) Everybody was puzzled by the fact that the Virgin had a halo, but her Son did not. And the floating figure? What was anyone to make of that?
Predictably, it was Professor Baudoin who said the disagreeable thing. As the others disputed he glared at the picture from very close range, plied the flashlight and the magnifying glass, rubbed an inch of paint with his spittle, and at last said loudly, “I don’t like the craquelure; I don’t like it at all; much too even; seems to have happened all at once. I recommend that we get the scientific men to work on it. I will lay any money it proves to be a fake.”
This brought an opinion—protest, demur, some inclination to agree—from all the experts. But even in his deep discomfort Francis could not miss the glance that Saraceni threw toward Baudoin, from his ill-coordinated blazing eyes. It had an impact like a blow, and Baudoin retreated to his chair as if a fierce gust of hot air had passed him.
When Colonel Osmotherley had quieted the uproar he explained that the Commission had no instructions to act as Baudoin suggested, and it would take a long time to get them, if that were possible. Could the experts not reach some conclusion based simply on what they saw? Giving every consideration to their widely acknowledged ability to see beyond what was given to lesser people, added the Colonel, who had a turn for diplomacy.
It was at this point that Francis, who had been suffering for two days and a half the torments of an inflamed conscience, disputing with a mischievous inclination to let the experts go on and commit themselves to positions from which they could not retreat, felt that he should rise to his feet and make a speech in the manner of the late Letztpfennig: “Gentlemen, I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little paintbox.” And then, what? Not hang himself, certainly, with his hat and overshoes on, as poor Letztpfennig had ridiculously done. But what a sea of explanations, of excuses or denials would follow any such declaration! The only person who could corroborate anything he said was Saraceni, and steadfast as the Meister could be in some things, he might prove altogether too supple in such a matter as this.
He had underestimated Saraceni, who now rose to his feet. This was in itself significant, for the experts usually spoke seated.
“Mr. Chairman; Esteemed Colleagues,” he began with heavy formality; “please permit me to point out that our attempts to explain the curious nature of this picture in terms of Christian iconography are bound to fail, because it is not solely—perhaps not even primarily—a Christian picture. Of course, it demands to be called The Marriage at Cana because of the words issuing from the mouth of that curious floating figure—Thou hast kept the good wine until now. In the Scripture story it is the so-called ‘governor of the feast’ who says that; here it is this mysterious figure who seems to be addressing the parents—the Knight and his Lady in the right-hand panel. This strange figure holds a unifying crown over the heads of Bride and Groom. Who are they? You will not have missed that they look more like brother and sister than a wedded pair. These facial resemblances are surely crucial to an interpretation of the picture? Look at the face of Christ. Is he not kin to the Bride and Groom? Look at the Knight and his Lady in the right-hand wing; are they not plainly the parents of both the married ones? Look at the old artist; a fat, elderly version of the same face. We cannot pretend that these resemblances come about because the artist can only draw one face; the man with the whip, the astrologer, the dwarf, the old woman in the curious cap, the Judas, all show how adept he was at portraiture and revelation of character. No, no, gentlemen; there is only one way to explain this picture, and I suggest, humbly, that I know what it is.
“Consider where it comes from. You don’t know? Of course not, because it has been hidden. But I know. It comes from Schloss Düsterstein, where, as you do know, there is an extraordinary collection of masterworks (or was, until General Göring took the best of them under his protection) upon which I was engaged for some years in repair and restoration work, before the war. But this picture was not among those that were hung. These panels were under wraps in a storage room very near the Chapel, where they had served as the altar-piece until the Chapel was wholly transformed in the Baroque taste by Johann Lys at some time during the first quarter of the seventeenth century. The old altar-piece was replaced by one painted by Lys, or one of his pupils, an inoffensive Madonna and Child with saints, which may still be seen. The old altar-piece had by that time become disagreeable to the taste of the Ingelheim family.
“Why? The picture we see here had grown out of fashion, and it was also, to a strict Christian taste, heretical. Look at it: this is a picture with strong alchemical suggestions. Of course, alchemy and Christianity were never incompatible, but to seventeenth-century theological orthodoxy, which was that of the Counter-Reformation, it was too near a rival to the true Faith.
“I don’t know what you may know of alchemy, and you must forgive me if I seem to tell you what is already clear in your minds. But this is plainly a depiction, given a Christian gloss, of what was called The Chymical Wedding. The alchemical uniting of the elements of the soul, that is to say. Look at it: the Bride and Groom look like brother and sister because they are the male and female elements of a single soul, which it was one of the higher aims of alchemy to unite. I won’t harass you with alchemical theory, but that unity—that wedding—was not achieved in youth or with ease, and so the Groom, at least, is not a man in his first youth. That such a unity is brought about by the intervention of the highest and purest element in the soul—which is, of course, what Christ has long been, and was to the Middle Ages, and is still in a somewhat altered but not destructively altered sense—is plain enough. Here we see Christ as a beneficent power at the Wedding. But in this picture it is the Holy Mother—what unorthodox but not heretical thinkers sometimes call Mother Nature—who blesses the Marriage of the Soul, the achievement of spiritual union. Am I making myself clear?”