The boys look at her, solemn-eyed, and nod as though this is a reasonable solution.
They are very serious, even the younger ones. At first Marina wonders if they are bored, but they don’t fidget or whisper or surreptitiously punch one another’s shoulders as boys will do. When Marina talks to them, they listen raptly, taking it all in with their deep, round eyes. In their young lives, they have already seen too much, and it has given them a slow and haunted demeanor. Even so, they have never seen things such as this. Their eyes widen at each new wonder.
They trail after her through the dim Jupiter Hall, crowded with hundreds of vases made of precious metals and stone and presided over by the towering gold and marble statue of Jupiter. It is like being undersea, with muted light filtering down through a few unbroken panes just below the ceiling and reflecting off the green stone walls.
“The walls are artificial marble,” she informs them, “made by a special process mixing marble dust and concrete and dyes. Each of the rooms down here has walls of a different color: here rose colored”-she gestures as they pass through the Ancient Courtyard-“and up here, in the Hall of Dionysus, it is the color of coral. This is a wonderful room. I think it is like being inside the mother’s womb, very red and dark and safe.
“Do you wish to see more?” The boys nod, mute but eager.
The captain, an elderly man in a long fur-collared coat, speaks up. “You are very generous, comrade, but we don’t wish to overtire you in your condition.”
She assures them that she is not tired at all, and, amazingly, she is telling the truth. She feels as though she could walk her charges through every single room of the museum if only they would follow. There is so much she wants to show them. So she leads them up the Main Staircase to the picture gallery on the first floor, holding up her lantern to guide them. Their footsteps echo on the parquet floors. Rows of dusty gilt frames line the barren walls.
“This is my favorite part of the museum, though it may be hard to see why. From here on out, you will have to rely entirely on your imagination.”
She walks them into the Rubens Room and stops before an empty frame. The boys look bewildered. Drawing a deep breath, she silently wills up the image. Gradually, a picture takes shape for her inside the frame. It is Rubens’s portrayal of Andromeda being rescued by the warrior Perseus. A wonderful winged horse slowly surfaces on the blank green wall inside the frame. Then the decapitated head of the gorgon and the open mouth of the sea monster in the foreground. This will appeal to boys, she decides.
She begins to sketch out the painting for them. Starting at the left edge, she describes the beautiful princess posed with one hand shyly covering her privates, her eyes downcast before the smitten Perseus.
“She is a princess and was about to be sacrificed to a sea monster. Perseus just happened to be flying over the sea on his winged horse-he had been off killing the evil gorgon, whose head is impaled on his shield here. The head is still alive and the face is terrified.” She makes a horrible face. “So Perseus looked down, and he saw the beautiful Andromeda chained to a rock, and he fell instantly in love. He flew down and rescued her by slaying the sea monster. Here, at the bottom of the painting, is the dead monster. He is green and very ugly, and his eyes are bulging.”
As she talks, she sees that one of the boys in particular is transfixed, a flush spreading across his cheeks. She is encouraged. She asks them to picture the angel placing a wreath on the hero’s head and the little putti that busily attend the scene. They are draping garments over the modest young woman and holding the reins of Pegasus, the winged horse.
“This one little putto looks frightened that he will be stepped on. Pegasus is such a lively horse. His flesh is slick and quivering, and his hooves are lifting off the ground. He has huge white wings, and they are poised for flight. Any second now he will lift into the sky. You can just feel it. In fact, everything in the painting is moving. You almost feel that if you turned away, and then turned back again, the painting would be different.” She moves on, but as she walks away she sees that one of the younger boys has lingered behind. He whips his head back and forth as though he may catch a glimpse of something if only he is fast enough.
She skips down a few frames and holds up her lantern. “This is the spot where the painting Bacchus hung. Does anyone know who he was?”
One boy volunteers that he was the Roman god of wine.
“Yes, that’s right. So this is a picture about drinking. Bacchus is holding up an enormous gold goblet, and it is being filled by one of his Bacchae. The Bacchae were his female attendants. And poised directly under the goblet here is a young cupid catching the spilled wine in his mouth, and another one here is urinating.” She sees one boy stifle a smirk. “Over here is Pan, and he is pouring a river of wine into his open mouth. They are all very drunk. Look, even the leopard is drunk.” She corrects herself. “In the painting, there is a leopard right here under Bacchus’s foot, and he is chewing on a grapevine like a drunken kitten.
“Now, usually Bacchus was portrayed as a slim and handsome young man, but Rubens shows him here as very fat. Imagine a very fat, naked man with flesh piled in rolls on his huge belly. This was painted at the end of Rubens’s life, when he was so sick with gout that he could hardly grasp a brush.”
The boys trade glances between themselves.
“Excuse me, comrade-what is gout?”
Of course these boys have never heard of such a thing. “It is the disease of the decadent bourgeoisie, caused by indulging in too much rich food and wine. Catherine the Great also had gout. It caused the extremities to swell painfully. Here Rubens has given Bacchus gout, as well. He is seated on a wine cask because his toes are too swollen for him to stand.”
One of the boys raises his hand and asks, “Is his female comrade naked also?”
“Well, no,” Marina answers, keeping her face straight, “she has only one breast exposed, but that is an astute question, because Rubens’s women are often unclothed. He was the undisputed master at painting skin and making it look real, and so he was famous for his nudes.”
“Are they pretty?” another boy asks.
“I think they are quite beautiful.”
As she moves down the wall, she points out Venus and Cybele, and the boys focus intensely, as though willing the naked women to appear.
In the next room, she stops in front of another vacant frame.
“Oh, I like this one very much. It is called Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin. There were so many paintings of the Madonna in the museum, but this one is particularly clever because it is not so much about the Madonna as it is about the artist and art itself.
“The people who commissioned van der Weyden wanted an official painting for their guild, which was like a union. They said, ‘Paint us a picture with the Madonna.’ So over on the left here, holding her child, is Mary.” Marina describes a woman wearing a dark, rather plain gown, very similar in color to the dark background.
“But the artist didn’t want to paint just another Madonna, because this was such a commonplace subject, so he cleverly put himself into the picture, disguised as Saint Luke, the patron saint of artists. A patron saint,” she adds, “is the dead person that believers prayed to for help.” With the flat of her hand, she sketches the space on the right that the figure occupied. “He is over here, holding a small canvas and a brush. But not only has van der Weyden put himself in the picture, but he’s dressed in bright red, from his head to his toes. So our eye is drawn to him rather than to Mary.
“And then our eye moves here, to the center of the painting. Do you see these two smaller figures in the background?” She catches herself, realizing that she is pointing to a blank square, but the boys and their teachers are all completely focused on the spot where she has directed their gaze. “There are two figures, a man and a woman. They are standing outside, past the studio where the artist is painting his model, and they’re gazing away from the viewer at the landscape beyond. They’re posed between two dark pillars that open onto a light-filled landscape. Our eyes follow theirs to the view of the peaceful river. It zigzags through a beautiful medieval city and off into this very soft, luminous horizon.”