Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/80

 evolved a new twist or theory. Thus, a feeling of defeat never left him.

At one especially despondent interval between new movements he toured the great museums. Tutored in cubist-futurism, at first he scoffed at Rembrandt, then retreated overwhelmed by the Godlike mastery of form. In the Prado, Velasquez was a portrait painter whose insidious technique had been devised to trick. Goya was an illustrator concerned with literature. Painting must be pure, without literary associations, didn't have to mean anything. But what should one do, say, about Titian—or Tintoretto!

Floating on the Grand Canal, the Lachryma Christi drunk with his luncheon was tears that drowned his spirits. In a black gondola Charon poled him down the malodorous Styx between old masters and cubist-futurists. He leaned back frowning into the azure dome across which drifted angelic clouds tinted with Venice's rose and gold. The sky was the Tiepolo ceilings in the Rezanico Palace where he had spent the morning.

Christ, those old birds certainly knew their perspective! Maybe they posed their models on a scaffold. A scaffold where Michelangelo spent so much time. He closed his eyes and the giants way up in St. Peter's dark dome hovered formidably. When he opened his eyes he was floating in royal violet and ruby twilight. The Venetians on the piazza were brush strokes by Guardi. The Doge's Palace a drawing washed with sunset blush.

Oh, hell, what's the use, who can compete with those guys! He turned to tell the boatman querulously to take him to the Piazza—and saw Manet's gondolier in straw hat, striped shirt, mustache, and all. At Florian's he ordered coffee. The wine at lunch had made him groggy. When the coffee came he asked for cognac. Over St. Mark's a last moon-pale ray of the sun through the deepening purple haloed the curve of a cobalt-grey cloud.

Naples yellow they used to get those high lights. Tinted with Naples yellow. Tinted with Tintoretto. Who could paint from a Montmartre model? Swell models, swell clothes, architecture, painting light. Maybe that's what one needed. The lush magnificence of the Uffizi, the Prado, the Louvre, the museums of Germany, Austria, and Holland, burst through the swell models and he ordered another cognac. Those old days were the days to have lived.

No, the cubists and futurists were right. What was done was finished and one must think up something else to offer in 68