THERE IS, HOWEVER, AN ELEMENT of the Titian painting that Freud failed to mention to Martha, and that was, I believe, central to his experience. The extent to which Jesus appears “noble”—Freud’s adjective—is accentuated by the contrast between Him and the other man. And the other man is the quintessential Jew.
What is being illustrated here would have been readily recognizable to a man of Freud’s generation. It is the moment in the New Testament when the Pharisees ask Christ whether they should adhere to the law requiring that they pay taxes to the Romans. The Pharisees were a Jewish sect, the name of which comes from the Hebrew perushim, meaning people who were “set apart.” Christ asks whose name and portrait are on the coin. As recounted in Matthew 22, Mark 12, and Luke 20, one of the Pharisees replies that it is Caesar’s. Christ then instructs him, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.”
The only character in the painting about whom Freud wrote Martha is Jesus, but there can be no doubt that the portrayal of Jesus’ counterpoint made a big impression on him. The Pharisee is the epitome of a Jew for whom money has disproportionate meaning. With his hooked nose, dark and oily skin, and sly, eager look, as well as the earring with which he flaunts his wealth, this particular Pharisee is pretty much how I picture the Jewish man whom the sixteen-year-old Freud could not stand on the train journey, and about whom he wrote his friend Fluss.
The way that Titian has painted the scene, it suggests that the Pharisee is attempting to trap Jesus. While pretending to ask if he should make payment to the Romans, he tries to hand the coin to Jesus. His dark hand, the shiny coin, and Jesus’ pale fingers tell the story. Jesus’ hand gesture makes clear that He is not accepting the payment, and also points to Caesar. Unlike Ceasar’s minions, He is above giving or taking bribes. The otherworldly look on His face confirms His lack of any trace of the materialism and greed that are redolent in the Jew.
WHEN I WAS IN DRESDEN, I HAD NO IDEA who the second man was; I only learned this in subsequent research. I swooned to the magisterial forms and saturated colors of Titian’s small masterpiece, and felt a rapport with Freud in his profound joy over Jesus’ tranquil grace and quiet strength. The contrast of the two personalities surely affected me, but I did not know why. Then, six months after the pilgrimage to Dresden, I decided to try to identify the man holding the coin, so that I could stop saying “the other man” when writing this text and could replace those vague words with a name when referring to the unpleasant character next to Jesus. Upon learning that he was “a Pharisee,” and finding out what the biblical moment was, I decided I had achieved my goal, and stopped my investigation. But then I realized that I did not know who the Pharisees were. When, after further research, I found out that they were Jews, I was surprised.
My education—good enough by American standards, given that I received a B.A. and an M.A. from two Ivy League universities, and attended a traditional preparatory school as well as Sunday school at the local Reform Jewish temple—had taught me none of this. But I assume that Freud’s had.
Once I had that knowledge that the fellow alongside Jesus was as Pharisee and hence a Jew, when I looked at the Titian in reproduction, I began to see the man next to Jesus practically as a Jewish caricature—of the type one sees, for example, in anti-Semitic cartoons about the Dreyfus affair. Was this because of my own way of seeing things more than because of objective reality? I sought to verify the matter.
I discovered that, even if recent books steer clear of the delicate subject of the Pharisee’s appearance, in older texts on Titian, the scholars saw him as I did (and, more important, the way we imagine Freud would have seen him). One distinguished art historian writing sixty years ago refers to “the sly attitude and the perverse expression of the Pharisee, this merchant of Venice, this tempting and vindictive Shylock.” A French professor who wrote an excellent book on Titian’s early years, published in 1919, calls the Pharisee Titian’s “Jew with a hooked nose . . . a sly and groveling beast.” For that man writing almost a century ago, the painting is all about contrasts, with the two figures’ hands even more telling than the difference between Christ’s beautiful visage in full sunlight and the Pharisee’s largely in shadow:
Titian has not only opposed two heads; the contrast of the hand is of as gripping an eloquence as that of the faces. The heavy paw of the Pharisee, modeled out of coarse material, is formed to amass and hold on to gold; it advances, twisted and hypocritical, and presents its gold crown like a trap offering its bait. The long and pale hand of Jesus drops with indolence an infinity of sweetness and disdain.
Just as the faces “contrast a vile profile against a divine face,” so do these limbs position evil against good. How marvelous to observe a hypocritical hand!
I remain fascinated that Freud wrote only about Jesus, while never acknowledging to his fiancée, a far more observant Jew than he was, that one of the main reasons we feel the magnificence of Jesus’ character is because of His contrast to the hideous Pharisee, and His resistance to the Pharisee’s connivery. In 1935, in a fine text on Titian that was published by the French sculptor Henri Laurens in a series enchantingly called Les Grands Artistes, Collection d’Enseignement et de Vulgarisation (Great Artists, Collection of Instruction and Popularization), Maurice Hamel writes:
Christ’s face, seen head-on, radiates a spiritual beauty. His fine and noble face, the frame and simple gesture of his hand that points out the effigy of Caesar, is opposed with a gripping clarity to the muddy color, to the sly and wily expression, to the insidious allure of the Pharisee. One could have found no better way to give this scene its moral meaning than by the antithesis of two natures.
Someone as alert as Freud was to what it meant to be Jewish was certainly aware of the function of the hook-nosed, loathsome, and crafty character trying to trap Jesus, and of the way that Jesus’ resistance to all that the Jew represents enhances his spiritual beauty.
IT IS NO WONDER, IN FACT, THAT FREUD DID NOT MENTION in the letter to Martha that the guy dangling money before Jesus was a Jew.
He was too embarrassed, and too tactful, to say as much. I understand this because of my own issues. Here goes, although this is uncomfortable to admit, and I feel ashamed of myself.
Even though Jesus, of course, was also a Jew, the Pharisee was “the wrong type” of Jew, the type described in the remarkable book Poor Cousins—an answer to Stephen Birmingham’s Our Crowd—in which Andrea Manners describes how the Our Crowd set (meaning, among others, my wife’s Warburg and Lewisohn relatives) tried to enact legislation to keep poor Yiddish-speaking Jews (like Katharine’s relatives on her father’s side) from getting into the United States. The Pharisee could have been one the people on the beach in New London, Connecticut, to which my fair blue-eyed maternal grandmother (brought up Jewish, but who, so the story goes, was born to a Catholic farmgirl and brought home to his wife by my randy great-grandfather who had conceived her with the creature I always picture as a pretty wench, like the Sistine Madonna) refused to go because the people had “too much black body hair.”
He could equally have been the loud guy from Long Island from whom I was so determined to disassociate myself when he and I were the only two guys to miss classes because of Yom Kippur on the third day of freshman year at Loomis, when I was still okay about it all but didn’t want to be likened to someone leaving the campus with his mother, who was driving a Cadillac to temple.
I came by this unattractive—you might say loathsome—snobbery honestly.
I remember a conversation in the car following a ski outing when I was about twelve years old that sums up what I mean by that. My mother and I had gone to Mount Tom, about an hour’s drive north of Hartford. The year was 1959, before there was man-made snow, and one had to take advantage of decent conditions as they occurred. There had been an ample snowfall a couple of days earlier, and so Mom had volunteered to take Ricky and me on the first day of our February vacation from the public junior high school.
Now that I think of it, I realize what a sport she was. The temperature was about fifteen degrees that day, and once we got to the ski area, Ricky and I went off to the steepest slopes, leaving her on her own. We met at midday for lunch in the cafeteria, but we didn’t see Mom again until it was time for her to drive us home.
What most fascinates me in retrospect is that on that car ride she chose to tell the following story in front of Ricky. Mom was a great raconteur, and described in vivid detail a long line to get on the T-bar lift. On the line, there was one area that required the skiers to negotiate a mound of snow. A woman about twenty people ahead of Mom had, in effect, created a traffic jam. She simply could not get up the mound. My mother amplified: “She had shiny new skis, expensive boots, and a ski outfit that must have cost a fortune, with a fur-trimmed hood, but she had obviously never skied before. She would try to work her way up the mound—with a sort of herringbone, the way other people did, or sideways—but she kept not making it. Yet she would not step aside. She was holding everyone up, and she acted as if she were the only person there, with her perfect clothes and equipment, and refused to let other skiers get around her. Finally, an instructor gave her a hand, and she waddled the rest of the way to the lift.”
Ricky, who adored my mother, thought the story was hilarious. And then Mom continued:
“My problem was that I could not stop thinking the woman was Jewish. I was furious at myself. For the rest of the afternoon—this occurred just after lunch—I kept asking myself, Why do you think she is Jewish? I was desperate to be proven wrong.”
Ricky and I waited to hear what had happened next.
“Then, as I was waiting for the two of you in the parking lot, I saw the woman again. You couldn’t mistake the white fur trim. And she was with a group of other similar ladies, all with their perfect skis, sitting on a bus. And I saw a sign on the bus that said ‘B’nai B’rith Ski Trip.’”
The three of us just laughed and said nothing more.
WHEN I WAS A SENIOR AT PREP SCHOOL, and applying to colleges, I had good reason to think I would get into Columbia, my second choice, if not Harvard, my first. But the college adviser recommended that I pick a safety school. He told me about Brandeis, of which I had never heard, characterizing it as having the qualities of the schools I wanted, with a strong emphasis on the arts, but not mentioning that there was anything Jewish about it.
That night, I told my mother I had heard about this great-sounding school I wanted to visit and apply to. She looked interested until I told her it was Brandeis. Then Mom made about the same face she had made when she saw Elia Kazan.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
Mom cleared her throat. “It’s hard to explain, Nicky, but you just would not be happy there. It’s not for you. How about Amherst or Williams, dear?”
Years later, she denied it all, but laughed unconvincingly. No wonder that when I gave my mother’s eulogy, and looked out at the four hundred or so well-turned-out people who packed the large sanctuary at Temple Beth Israel, I had to fight hard to resist telling them all my mother’s definition of a nymphomaniac: “A Jewish woman who goes to bed with her husband the same day she’s had her hair done.”
Freud certainly wasn’t stupid enough to tell his observantly Jewish fiancée the role of the Pharisee when describing his reaction to the Titian double portrait. But I’m convinced I understand. It was the same issue.
The Tribute Money WAS PAINTED BETWEEN 1510 AND 1516. The authorities differ on its date but concur that Titian finished it before he was thirty—although the artist’s birth date is also uncertain. What everyone agrees on is that it is among the artist’s earliest known works, yet is one of his masterpieces.
Vasari writes that Titian painted this wooden panel to go inside the door of an armoire or a clothes closet. Whatever its purpose, it has a fantastic quality of finish. Jesus’ skin is as smooth as glazed porcelain, while both men’s hair and beard are coarse and thick. The silkiness of Jesus’ clothes—the regal blue cloak draped over His broad shoulders has a luminous sheen—gives Him a sense of majesty. The edgy lines and mottled surfaces of the Pharisee make him as discomfiting as Jesus is reassuring.
But what this painting evokes above all else cannot be verbalized. Looking at it, our breathing is altered by its indescribable religiosity, by the beatific qualities that emanate from it. The drama between the Pharisee’s emphasis on money and Jesus’ eschewal of it not only makes this holiness all the more impressive but creates a thrilling scenario that engages the viewer the way that great theater does. The dark void between the two figures assumes the representation of mental intensity; Jesus’ and the Pharisee’s contrasting thoughts seem to penetrate it. This field of black is all the more powerful in contrast to the bright shimmer on the copper coin—an electric spark in the scenario.
Jesus seems to know everything. He recognizes that people will lie and betray Him. His face makes clear that, alive as He is, He will die.
There is no escaping that brutal fact. The mixture of otherworldly spirituality and earthly realism is what gives this painting its élan.
Jesus resembles His own mother—to an unusual degree. If you take away the facial hair, He is the same person as in many images of the Madonna; the cast of His eyes is both tender and full of foreboding. There is, nearby in the same gallery at the Zwinger, a Mother and Child by Titian where the Virgin Mary has the identical tilt to her head, as well as the same features. Jesus’ combination of male and female qualities in Freud’s chosen Titian makes Him all the more impressive.
Even regardless of the Jewish theme, which can only have added to the allure of the work, it is no surprise that Freud—the ultimate connoisseur, possessed of a keen eye and the rare gift to single out what mattered—was moved above all by this exquisite image of Christ resembling his mother. After I had toured the entire incredible museum, and returned to this Titian, I realized that, even more than the Vermeers, it is the masterpiece. Nothing else is quite as human and intimate, or provides such a close-up focus on the soul. No other painting evokes the way a man is often remarkably like his female parent.
I CANNOT BE CERTAIN THAT THE PAINTING STILL HANGS exactly where it did in 1883. But Freud was there—with Titian, in Titian’s aura—as I was. In front of the painting, I felt closer to the great doctor than I did at either Bergasse 19 or 38 Marsfield Gardens, both of which I have diligently visited. In the glow of this Renaissance masterpiece, I had the sensation that I, too, was confronting humanness, death, beauty, intelligence, maleness, light (physical and spiritual), and the supreme mastery of the technique of painting. Beyond that, as Paul Klee said, great art looks at us—as much as we look at it.
The spell Susie cast when she stood with the Karpes was because she belongs in the same category as Jesus and as Freud: people who respond in every fiber of their being. She engaged; 100 percent alert, she was one of the rare ones who do not go through life in a daze. The same, of course, can be said for her great frienemy, my mother.
Freud’s last words about the Titian to Martha slay me. “So I went away with a full heart.”