Cannot Stay. Kevin Oderman
and in the background, sketchily drawn, the Bethulian soldiers march out the city gate to engage the mounted barbarians.
Botticelli’s decision to focus on Judith’s return allows him to portray Judith as serene, allows us to contemplate doing God’s will as a matter of simple obedience. The sword strokes, while not denied, take place comfortably off screen. There are plenty of other paintings in the tradition that portray Judith in the very act, her sword quick in the cut in Holofernes’s neck, her off hand tangled in his hair.
In Botticelli’s little panel, Judith strides left to right across the picture. Looking as if she’s hurrying to keep up, her maid Abra follows her closely, carrying the swaddled head of Holofernes in a basket on her own head. That makes three heads close together, and a good deal of the painting’s energy derives from their proximity. Botticelli painted Judith turned halfway toward the viewer; her head is tilted back, toward the tents, but her eyes seem to be looking inward, a face remembering. Abra leans forward in her hurry and is seen more directly from the side. Her left foot has just missed stepping on Judith’s flowing gown; the elbow of her lifted arm, balancing the basket on her head, extends behind Judith’s trailing shoulder. Their heads are drawn within inches of each other. Although they must be walking at the same spanking pace, the speed registers more clearly in Abra’s dress, which she has hitched up with her free hand to keep from stumbling. The fabric of her dress has whirled into a vortex at the hem; the wicker bottles looped around her wrist strain at the end of their braided tethers, flying behind. Abra’s dusky face stares directly at Judith; it is not a look of unalloyed admiration.
Only the height of the shallow basket separates Holofernes’s head from Abra’s. Her white headscarf is very like the white cloth wrapped around his head, and the loose ends of both trail dramatically like pennons in the wind. Abra keeps a firm grasp on the basket’s rim. Still, Holofernes’s head has tipped back; his darkened face is turned up, addresses the morning sky. Holofernes looks more a man peacefully asleep than a man startlingly dead. As if in death he’s found his part.
It is Botticelli the painter, concerned with it all, who has chosen to bring their heads so close, and our faces close to theirs. Mistress and maid might just as well have leaned apart and Holofernes’s grizzled head been carried in a bag (as it is in the Book of Judith). The three heads clustered together at the top of the canvas form an irregular triangle, but their relation does not feel static. Perhaps because Judith looks back, Abra forward, and Holofernes up, the three heads seem caught in a planetary whirl around some unseen star.
I stood looking a long time, and when finally I turned away from Judith’s Return to Bethulia, it was as a man finished. Full up, I’d be able to look at the rest of the show, but only look. I might have left then and been happy; when the cup’s full, why go on pouring?
I found Delta in a room devoted to angels, lost in her own private tableau vivant, posing as the archangel Gabriel in front of a Filippino Lippi, an annunciation. Delta looked as if she’d just touched down; her reproduction of the angel’s pose in her own quivering body was uncanny. I expected to hear her whisper, “Fear not, Mary…” Another way of knowing, and profound. When Delta sensed my presence behind her she turned her face to mine, radiant, “So wonderful,” is what she actually said. I asked her if, when she’d looked at the Botticelli annunciation in the room before, in which the angel has not yet quite landed, if she had managed to hover, looking. Immediately she inclined her head, crossed her arms across her chest, and leaned forward, in the pose of that Gabriel, and I could almost see the lilies on their long stem, the bright wings aloft behind her. But Delta was museum weary, too, and we began to stroll, together, less attentive than before.
Delta’s not much of a traveler, and if it hadn’t been for the promise of annunciations, she might not have agreed to an Italian journey. Perhaps it was the tiny Angel of the Annunciation by Simoni Martini in the National Gallery back in D.C. that convinced her. That Gabriel’s odd, but winning, squat pose. The heavy drape of his brocade gown. His face, firm but tender. I don’t know how to account for Delta’s feeling for these paintings, not religion, anyway. But it’s a fact of her particular culture; her anthology of Western painting would be thick with Gabriel and Mary. Perhaps it has to do with the central place of the word in the encounter. The sudden appearance of the angel creates the drama—now there where a moment before he was not. But the angel has come to speak, as a go-between. His words are often painted right there between the angel and the virgin, scrolling out, the duration of his speech included in the stopped time of the painting. The divine arrives riding a word.
We paused in front of Filippino Lippi’s Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist and Angels, a long title for a big tondo depicting the naked Christ held waist high by an impassive Mary. The Babe leans out to pick a nosegay from a shallow bowl of flowers an angel offers to him. A trio of angels kneels and sings. A bit saccharine, no doubt. In the background the boy Baptist, already dressed in those unfashionable hides, bides his time. The angels have their backs to him, do not sing to him, though perhaps he is listening.
“Harold,” I whispered into Delta’s ear, and she covered her mouth to stifle a snicker, unsuccessfully. I was laughing, too, a private joke.
The joke was puerile, perhaps, but not without occasion. For us, Harold was the name of an ugly baby, and in so many paintings otherwise beautiful the only unlovely thing on view is the little baby Jesus. In the Filippino Lippi, hanging there, Jesus looks outsize, awkwardly splayed and naked—it’s a boy!—and bulbous. A baby so big, you’d think he’d be heavy. But no, to judge by Mary’s posture and her mostly open hands, that baby must be weightless. And there seems to be something wrong with his age. Elizabeth’s boy, the Baptist, within a half a year of Christ’s own age, looks already a rough adolescent. But perhaps the problem lies with John, who needs his skins and cruciform staff to be immediately legible, and therefore can’t be a baby, too.
After that, we began to see Harolds everywhere, and, as it turned out, Filippino’s baby wasn’t all of that Harold compared to some others in the exhibition.
Harold escaped from Raymond Carver’s story “Feathers”; that’s how he ended up in Florence, famous, camping up all those old-master Madonnas—Madonna and Harold, often enough. In Carver’s story, Jack and his snide wife, Fran, have been invited to dinner by Jack’s friend Bud and his wife, Olla. Before they are even out of the car they are accosted by Olla’s “Bird of Paradise,” the peacock Joey. “May-awe!” That’s what Joey says.
Dinner has wound down before Olla can be convinced to bring in the baby, Harold, who has been fussing in his own room. Jack recalls, “Bar none, it was the ugliest baby I’d ever seen. It was so ugly I couldn’t say anything.” The moment stretched—you’ve just got to compliment new parents on their baby. “Ah!” Fran says, and, “isn’t that some baby.” Jack volunteers, “He’s a big fellow, isn’t he?” But Jack exclaims, telling the story to us, that, “It was so pop-eyed, it was like it was plugged into something.” Me and Delta, when we read the story aloud, we laughed so hard we wept. But Carver doesn’t invite us to look down on his characters, to laugh at them from a height. I know I identified with all the characters in “Feathers,” not excluding the bird. And Delta, she told me how once she’d served a casserole so bad the guests had been stunned into silence, like Fran and Jack, until one of them had thought to remark that the temperature of the dish was, “just about right.”
So Harold found a place in our world, in the enlivened air between us, where relationship lives. Joey, too. Indeed, Joey first. We began announcing our returns to the house not with, “I’m home,” but with a loud “may-awe,” which carried rather better, around corners, up the stairs.
Walking through the Palazzo Strozzi, Harold threatened to take over the show. Botticelli’s little tondo, Virgin and Child with Three Angels, painted with extreme delicacy, of a beauty luminous and refined, suffered the epithet, Harold at Table, a title that pretty much deprived it of all its many virtues.
In the painting, Mary kneels in the foreground, center right, while Christ totters toward her from the left. To keep the baby from taking a first-steps tumble, a small angel walks behind him in a crouch, at the ready. Mary