December Suite V: Sospiri

I had just finished my scrambled eggs when she came through the door. Kaufmann's full name was Francesca Kaufmann, but because, as she put it, "there were five Francescas in my primary school alone", everybody called her Kaufmann. She was originally from Grado, but had moved to Milan with her mother after the divorce, studied art history there and in Rome, and then had gone to Zurich for her PhD, where we met. She had actually worked on Rosalba Carriera, and also on Gentileschi, and on Anguissola. Having completed her PhD thesis in three years while mine took me the full seven, she took up a postdoc position at the University of Ljubljana, went to Japan on a travel grant, then returned to Ljubljana and quickly became assistant professor there. She had co-authored a paper with Alenka Zupančič ("Instruments"), written a much-acclaimed, extremely intelligent study on Anguissola and Rubens, and a book on infancy in paintings of female Renaissance artists that warranted several newspaper interviews and podcast appearances and made her name somewhat well-known beyond art history circles. When she came through that café door, she had been in Trieste for three days already, because she took part in a conference on Italo Svevo and the visual arts.

I got up to greet her. As always, she was almost impossibly friendly and gave me the warmest hug imaginable. We sat back down again and she ordered a cappuccino and I ordered another espresso. We hadn't seen each other for months and I asked her how she was.

"I'm good", she said. "The conference is fun. Do you know Irina Valent?"
I said no.
"She's a professor in Naples, extremely bright. Almost seventy years old, but full of energy. She's a Svevo expert, apparently, but has also worked a lot on German literature, so I thought you might know her."
I had done a BA in German literature before focusing exclusively on art history.
"I don't, unfortunately", I said.
"I like talking with philologists", she said, "I feel they are more interdisciplinary than we are, as a discipline I mean. At least in Renaissance studies, we're so much our own little bubble. We make a fuzz about interdisciplinarity, of course, but then most we can do is read the occasional Aretino. I remember when I wanted to organize the colloquium with Zupančič, it was almost impossible simply for administrative reasons. 'They're philosophers', well, yeah, that's kind of the point."
"It's the same in Zurich."
"I can imagine." A pause, almost too short to notice. "The Svevo group is very nice, I should get you acquainted some time. You d'like them."

We talked a bit more about the conference, about Svevo (whom, it turned out, we both preferred over that other Italo, Calvino), about Modernism and about Trieste, and, of course, about the academics assembled for the conference. There was an obnoxious historian from the NYU, a philologist from Trinity college whose talk had apparently been rather bad but whom Kaufmann described as enormously funny "and with real emotional intelligence, very cordial, very honest"; and, obviously, about Irina Valent and what she had said about her three children. I, on the other hand, told her about my weird dinner with Josip and how he had simply stayed at the little restaurant while the train moved on without him.

Then she shot me a complex look.
"How are you doing? You mentioned something of a crisis."
"Oh, it's not a big crisis or anything. I just don't know what to do with my life."
"Right." Her look went a different kind of complex. "It's shitty to be in academia."
"You seem to have fun", I said.
"That doesn't mean it's not shitty". She laughed a little laugh. "It's really stressful, and it kind of leads nowhere."
"Yeah, but as long you have fun, right? And I don't know whether I still have fun."
"Is there something else you would like to do?"
"If there were, there were no crisis at all, I guess."

I was toying with the little bag of sugar that came with my espresso. She was idly turning the spoon in her cappuccino.

"Do you also feel that all images have started turning into Cenotaph for Joshua Reynolds?"
"What?"
"Do you also feel that all images, so, posters and paintings and photos and whatever, all slowly turn into Cenotaph for Joshua Reynolds, like, the Constable painting?"
"What do you mean by 'turn into'?"
"Well, they stop being the image they are and turn into Cenotaph for Joshua Reynolds instead. "
"You are still in therapy, right?"
"Yes, yes. And it's very good. I have a great therapist. Don't worry, I'm not in that kind of crisis."
Another complex look.
"I'm really not."
"Ok."
"Look, what I'd love to do – this will sound stupid – is I want to glorify people. That's it. I think the world is working in mean and spiteful and debasing ways, and great people lose the sense of how great they are and idiots think they are great."
She laughed her little laugh, but in a very friendly way. There was a generous cadence to it.
"Does this" – she gestured at our small round table – "look like a dive bar Stammtisch to you? That was a surprisingly broad stroke even for your standards."
I laughed as well.
"I told you it would sound stupid. But isn't that what art is for, in a way? Like, isn't that portrait painting, or was portrait painting for a long time, giving people their dignity back?"
"Not really", she said, "like, scientifically speaking, not really. It was an accumulation of capital to capital; rich and powerful people amassing cultural capital through their being portrayed. You know that. Hardly anyone got anything 'back'."
"Yeah, I know, it's not the perfect example. Let me say: the history of portraiture without the portraits. The method of it. The way that you say, ok, this person here deserves this extreme attention and these expensive pigments and so much of my time – like, not because they're the king or a count or the pope or whatever, but because they exist and they have a power and a glory."
"Are you trying to out-catholicise me?"
"You know the converts are always the most zealous."
"Your family converted like ten generations ago."
"That is absolutely no timespan for Catholic standards."

We ordered another round of coffee. This time, she also opted for an espresso.

"Are you thinking of something like Chardin, maybe? Rather of still lives than of portraits?", Kaufmann asked.
"Well, in a way, but I phrased that poorly before. It's not about the power of existing alone, like about the glory of this potato or that flower simply because of the miracle of existence."
"Musk exists."
"Exactly. And we wouldn't want to glorify him, right... that would be – well, not simply wrong, and offensive, but also it would be tautological. He already gets glorified, in the way that not everyone thinks he's ridiculous. That is glorification."
"Right." She laughed. "So, no potatoes and no billionaires."
"No potatoes and no billionaires", I nodded, "although potatoes are a maybe. Have you read Pan Apolek, by any chance?"
"I don't think I have."
"It's this short story by Isaak Babel, and it's about a church painter in today's Poland – I think it's Poland, but I might be misremembering – who gets in trouble with the church authorities because he paints the saints, like, he paints the icons in the churches and chapels and what not, but what he does and what gets him into trouble is that he portrays people from his village as those saints, meaning that Mary has the face of, say, I really don't remember what it is in the story, but let's say it's the face of a poor woman raising her children alone in that run-down farm at the edge of town; and God has the face of the old man drinking all day in the village inn, and Mary Magdalene has the face of, like, I don't know, a young mother prostituting herself."
Kaufmann laughed.
"Why are you laughing?"
"I can't believe you're telling me this. I mean, you were the one who would always say you didn't like Italian painting. You'd go on about Rembrandt and Constable and Courbet and Chinese painting and children's drawings and truth against idealization; for fuck's sake, you wrote your thesis on the political history of egg yolk in painting and claimed that it was more leftist to do that than –"
"Than studying female painters who also just painted kings, yes, and I told you I am sorry –"
"I am not offended." She looked serious, but there was this glint in her eyes, this Kaufmann glint – like an ounce of magma burning in her green irises, and when that glint was there, you knew her spectacular brain was completely alert, and when it was, she was eternally, inviolably amused.
"I am not offended, I am intrigued – and confused. You build a career shit-talking the Italians and then you meet me, in Italy of all places, and tell me that peak painting is when you paint village people as saints. You know who did that, we both know. Caravaggio did. Titian probably did, Tintoretto probably – very probably – did, and more who don't come to my mind right now. I mean, it was a necessity, was it not? You'd need models, so you either copied faces and bodies, copied figures, from another painting, or you paid someone to come and play the saint, or play the angel, play Joseph, play Mary. And what did the Dutch do at the same time, or perhaps a bit later, what do I know: paint potatoes. And kings."
"But that is different! First of all, I like Titian and Tintoretto, I never said otherwise. But it's different if you simply use people because you need to use some sort of model in order to paint a figure. In that case, the identity of the person you use, I mean their social identity, too, their profession, their position in society, all that, all that's so important in Pan Apolek, all that is not important if you simply need to have anyone who also has a body readable as a male or female body, or a child body, or an adult or what not."
"It's likely they would be from very low ranks of society, though. Except if we're talking, like you did before, talking about portraiture; in that case, obviously they're not, then they're from the very high ones."
"Right. But it's like a side-effect. Their social position is a side-effect. In Pan Apolek, it's front and center. It's taking a debased person and portraying them as Mary or God or –"
"Yeah, yeah, I understand that; but that's exactly what Caravaggio did."
"But Caravaggio is so theatrical, he's so unreal."
"Well you run that risk when you're painting saints, no?"
"Yes! Absolutely. That's why I think the saints-thing is overrated. It's overrated, which is why Italian painting is overrated, but it's also overrated in the way I summarized Pan Apolek. I don't think Apolek – oh, Pan Apolek is the name of the painter in the story, I forgot, that's why it's called that – I don't think Apolek wants to say "you're like saints", or "the saints were literally people like you" or anything like that. It's more like: In this small village in Poland, the greatest expression of 'honor' is when you are in a painting, and in order to be in a painting, you need to be in a church painting, because they are no others, and in order to be in a church painting, you need to play a saint, because that's what church paintings depict. Here, the saint-thing is just a side-effect, or perhaps more precisely a necessary, administratively necessary, but semantically unimportant step. What Apolek wants is to bestow the greatest honor he can think of onto the people who get treated the shittiest, wants to accord them the highest dignity."
"An image of themselves."
"Yes! But not in the sense that 'poor people in the 20th century only saw their own figure in water surfaces' and so on and now they finally see themselves and what they – wait, am I correct about this in the first place? Were their widespread mirrors in the early 20th century?"
She shrugged.
"Anyway, it's not about them seeing what they look like, for the first time what they look like and all, it's about them seeing how they are."
"I see."
"When there are not layers and layers of assholery on top of them."
"Right."
"Hiding their glory."
"The glory thing again."
"My minimal Catholicism."

At this point, the three elderly women from the settee corner got up and left the café. They had to pass our table to do so, and I realized that they were not elderly at all, they were actually younger than Kaufmann and I, but for some obscure reason they wore grey wigs. They waved the waitress goodbye. They went out the café door in an inexplicably pseudo-choreographed way, like a black, grey-topped amoeba floating through a keyhole.

"Is this how you always look at neurodiverse people?"
"I'm just fascinated by their wigs. What makes you think neurodivergent?"
"Neurodiverse. They are young women knitting. How many more signs do you need?"
"Can't knitting be just their hobby?"
"I don't think it is, and also, those aren't wigs, that's heir hair dyed grey."
"And then done up in that way? They look like The Ladies Waldegrave."
"I like it. I thought about dyeing my hair white once."
"I can see it, in fact! But would you then do that hairdo?"
"No, and I wouldn't spend my mornings knitting in a café either, but I'm 35, and neurotypical."
"I wouldn't call the brightest person alive neurotypical."

That unlocked a considerable eye roll even for Kaufmann standards.

"What made you want to dye your hair white?"
"What makes you want to glorify people?"
"It wears me down seeing amazing people getting treated like shit, not just by other people, not just by the toxic people we have at the Uni as much as there are at any other Uni, not just by, I don't know, people they meet. But getting treated like shit by landlords and the rent system in general, by the terrorists of the normal, by people who think their shitty way of running things is great and –"
"Ok, ok, I see."
"Do you?"
"I mean, no. Or somewhat. I think that the contemporary art scene is very critical, in the sense that critique is the dominant mode. You portray things you want to criticize. Caricature is the blueprint, in a way, the germ of thinking. Or you do the full utopia where there is no ableism, no sexism, no racism, no, I don't know, no capitalism."
I nodded less out of agreement than out of 'go on'.
"Non-figurative art is latently utopian, and sometimes a caricature. And you want to revive a certain glorifying, positive trend in art. The sort of thing Hockney is maybe doing."
"Yes, except -"
"Except not the Grand Canyon."
"Well whatever, why not glorify the Grand Canyon. But Hockney is almost too playful."
"Too playful?"
"Yes, like, if you're having that much fun, isn't it dangerously close to irony?"
"Hm. Isn't it rather enthusiastic, awash with joy, no irony whatsoever?"
"To me, that's a bit like doing a child's drawing when you are an adult. Like, there is this obvious distance. You play with that distance, that difference in age and all. And that's ironical enough for me."
"But they're really not like children's drawings."
"No... but in a way?... no, look, Apolek is doing something very, very earnestly. He paints with the seriousness of the church painter he is, the severity of a religious painter. There's nothing funny to him about –"
"Funny and fun are two very different things."
"That's true, but let me finish: there is nothing funny to him about his art in the sense that it is infinitely earnest in its result. The whole spiel about how you touch the holy in religious painting, that is totally there, except it is transformed or transported onto a completely social endeavor. It's not about anything metaphysical, or yes, it is, but only in some secondary sense. It's not like with Caravaggio, where you paint this sex worker or that syphilitic beggar or that debtor and then everything refers back to the great hidden order of the Catholic church. It is much more local, more specific, more between the people who are actually there, it is almost performance art."
"Nice, but I think you wildly misread the structure and function of the Catholic church in Baroque Italy. It is really much closer to this everyday world and to the way you can relate to other people and make sense of the world."
"Yeah, I know. Maybe I misread... but there's the pope, and there's no pope to Apolek. In fact, the representatives of the Catholic church end are the very authorities he gets in trouble with."
"Look, I haven't read the story. I will read it, though. It sounds fun."

She drank the last bit of her espresso. Then she looked at me, happily, and asked:

"Is this gonna be a Glass situation?"

'Glass situations' were a meme between the two of us. It led back to the weeks right after the thing with Alma was over. I was, then, too, travelling through the Veneto, except from another direction. I had left Riva del Garda, where we had had our last days of the affair; she returned to Vienna, and I had boarded a train towards Trieste, as I tended to do in moments of turmoil. And on that train, Spotify, in its wisdom, had recommended a Philip Glass track to me, called "The Poet Acts". The music swelled and collapsed and swelled and collapsed again in the sort of directionless intensity of an overflowing, handed-down, contentless romanticism; feelings went hard, but nowhere. It was a turmoil without place, a battle without field, the whole thing felt like it stopped towards. It felt fitting to a pain that felt immeasurable primarily in the sense that I had no idea of how to scale it, and it felt fitting to the dramatic final chapters of the Alps that my train crossed – attuned to the movements of the fog rising and collapsing over mountain faces, plunging into firn-covered ravines, extending over the first brown acres of Veneto fields, appearing and disappearing, rising and fading. I had thus sent the Spotify link to my best friend at the time, Francesca Kaufmann, with the caption "mood".

Neither of us had ever listened to a Glass track before, both of us would grow to dislike him; and neither of us had watched the film the piece was part of the soundtrack to, The Hours. But we quickly got into a disagreement about the title. She was adamant that "Acts" was a verb; "The Poet Acts" as in 'the dog sniffs', or, even stronger, as in: 'the dog barks'. To her mind, the track was about the poet doing something, or about the poet being defined by the very fact of his doing. To me, "Acts" was a noun: "The Poet Acts" as in The Aspern Papers. The track were the acts, the deeds or, even stronger, the administrative side of, the poet; in either case, an overview of the results or the documentation thereof. We never agreed, and since then, a 'Glass situation' had become the term when we, happily or grudgingly, identified an argumentative impasse between the two of us.

"I mean, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what I think about the theory. What keeps you from doing it?"
"What do you mean?"
"Like, what keeps you from glorifying those debased people around you? What keeps you from painting the portraits – if I understand you correctly, the end result of the whole thing would be portraits – what keeps you from painting them, or doing whatever else you imagined would be the equivalent of Pan Apolek in 2025?"
"I have barely any idea how. I can't paint well enough and I don't know how I would have to paint the people so that they come out the way I imagine it, so that they are dignified. And I don't know whether I could become a painter just out of, don't know, right now."
"Yeah, but come on, no one ever does. I don't want to diminish the challenges and all. But if things are as bad as you say for the 'human race', if you let me be plump for a moment, and I agree that they are, then my god, I'm not being naive when I say that the only way there even is is forward and upwards. Not saying that nothing can go wrong, but saying that going is infinitely more safe than not going. And it's about finding out, right? If you realize it doesn't work out, you can still change it. You hated the Italians for a decade and now you realize you like some of their aspects after all. Why not? No shame in that. But shame in not trying."
"Get rich or die trying."
We both nodded, millenials that we were.
"I have to get going, unfortunately. The last stint of the conference begins in an hour."
"Is it going to be fun, at least?"
"Four talks that I look forward to and then the closing remarks by that dreadful guy from Madrid."
"My best wishes."
She laughed.

We waved to the waitress, paid, and got out of the café into the street, passing the door rather less elegantly than the trio of grey-haired young women.

We said our goodbyes.

"Are you going to be ok?", she asked.
"Certainly", I said.

She looked at me in the way that I know was a Kaufmann way of looking lovingly at someone, and it warmed me.

"Oh, and in case", she said.
"In case of what?", I asked.
"In case you think there are no predecessors for exactly the sort of art you're thinking of."
"Yes?"
"You might, after all, look at a few female painters."
"Look, I'm not saying –"
"I know what you're not saying. And you know what you're not saying. What I want to know is what you are saying."

She gave me one of those complex looks, then turned around, almost on her heels; and with a wave of her hand and the least amount of steps downstreet she was gone, Europe's greatest art historian disappearing in old town alleys and Adria mist.