The Shadow Catcher

“Those of us who knew him could — his shoulders, neck. This painting used to be in a frame and the framed picture used to hang on the first landing on the stairs in our house and as soon as I was old enough to reach it I used to take the painting off the wall and turn it around, look at the back, to try to see what the man in the painting was staring at, what he saw, where he was looking. That’s the point of drawing figures in this way. To conjure up the mystery of where they’re looking. The dark back of what they’re seeing. The dark back of time. Everything, perhaps, that ever existed, that may still exist, somewhere in time, beyond or below the horizon, beyond that place we all see on the railroad tracks, you know, when they appear to come together. The vanishing point. Logic tells us that those iron railroad tracks will never come together, never really meet, and yet our eyes tell us the opposite, they inform the optical illusion that things — lines — come together at the visual horizon. We know they don’t, and yet we see they do. And this simple fact of illusionary lines coming together seems so obvious to us, to our modern eye, to anyone who’s traveled down a long straight road or walked out onto the center of a railroad track, and yet five hundred years ago Giotto and his contemporaries couldn’t master it — they hadn’t discovered this perspective and its simple rules of rendering a landscape in the third dimension. You see how he does it with the human figure — here, this woman and this Madonna — how he drapes the head, shows the face behind the fabric to accentuate the depth within the eyes. He could do it with the human face and human figure, but he hadn’t figured out how to keep his buildings, these city houses, from floating off the canvas — see them, here? — the way these walls seem to collide? — the way one building belongs to a dimension that the other ones don’t share? That’s why in 1346 you have this disembodied hand — the hand of God, really — hanging in the ether, disdimensionalized, whereas a century and a half later, in this sketch of Michelangelo’s for instance, you have a full-bodied God leaning down from Heaven, in perspective, touching Man. Enormous rebirth of knowledge and technique in a single century — compare these little flames Giotto paints above the heads of saints — they look like wildfires — to the subtlety of saintliness Duccio or Da Vinci can elicit.”

He was staring at her, looking not just seeing.

I’m talking too much she said, realizing she was almost giddy, light-headed, with this rush of words and their relief from loneliness.

“But then my father—”

“—what was his name?”

“Haarald. Haarald Phillips. When we talked about those figures facing inward toward the canvas — how unknowable and mysterious they are — father said perhaps Giotto painted them that way to depict the route of possibility. Not, as I thought, that they are looking at the past, but that they are looking at the other side of time, the time of possibilities, the time of things that might have happened but did not. The bright back of time, not the dark one. The bright one, of hope. Not the one of shadows. The back of time that is all futures. Endless possibilities. Not only the remembered past.”

He was still staring at her, his head against the pillow and despite his stillness and his rapt attention she noticed a taut muscle in his cheek, a pencil line of white above his upper lip where the blood was drawn away. She took his hand and he clasped hers needily. “You have to tell me where the pain is, Edward. Pain is nothing to be denied. It’s your body speaking. It’s a language.”

Almost imperceptibly he shook his head.

“The doctor will have laudanum, at the very least.”

“No. No opium. You must give me your word—”

“I can’t watch you suffer.”

“I would watch you struggle. If you asked me to. If our roles were reversed.”

“I don’t know that I could ask someone to do that. When there is something else that can be done.”

More, he said.

“—more broth?” He had drained the bowl.

“More talk. Keep talking. Tell me everything you know. The painting on the sea chest. Did your father paint it?”