loading...

Art in novels: the responsive eye of novelist Donna Tartt reading the Rembrandt’s masterpiece

After Donna Tartt‘s description of one of the rare Carel Fabritius‘s canvases we posted two days ago in relation with the restoration of the Mauritshuis, here another effective passage from the same book. The protagonist, Theo Decker, remembers his mother reading for him one of the Rembrandt’s masterpieces while visiting a fictional exhibition titled “Portraiture and nature morte: Northern masterworks of the golden age” at the Met. A few minutes later the explosion of a bomb inside the museum kills the woman.

“Now, Rembrandt,” my mother said, “Everybody always says this painting is about reason and enlightenment, the dawn of scientific inquiry, all that, but to me it’s creepy how polite and formal they are, miling around the slab like a buffet at a cocktail party. Although – “ she pointed” – “see those two puzzled guys in the black there? They’re not looking at the body – they’re looking at us. You and me. Like they see us standing here in front of them – twp people from the future. Startled. ʽwhat are you doing there?ʼ Very naturalistic. But then” – she traced the corpse, midair, with her finger – “the body isn’t painted in any very natural way at all, if you look at it. Weird glow coming off it, do you see? Alien autopsy, almost. See how it lights up the faces of the men looking down at it? Like it’s shining with its own light source? He’s painting it with that radioactive quality because he wants to draw our eye to it – make it jump out at us. And here” – she pointed to the flayed hand – “see how he calls attention to it by painting it so big, all out of proportions to the rest of the body? He’s even turned it around so the thumb is on the wrong side, do you see? Well, he didn’t do that by mistake. The skin is off the hand – we see it immediately, something very wrong – but by reversing the thumb he makes it look even more wrong, it registers subliminally even if we can’t put our finger on it, something really out of order, not right. Very clever trick”.

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch, 2013.

December 22, 2016