Even now, I’m at a loss as to why I get so exercised about that bloody book on Holbein. I’m well aware that, on some level, it has nothing to do with the book at all. And that if I wasn’t obsessing about Holbein I’d only be obsessing about how I seem quite determined to smash John’s Jag up, which was, after all, his pride and joy. Or the fact that the blood blister under my thumbnail, where I trapped it in the bathroom, is slowly but surely taking on the appearance of a small black heart.
All the same, there really is something peculiarly beautiful about Holbein’s portraits, and there’s no question that they move me in some unfathomable way. Two or three of them I can remember quite clearly – namely, those on permanent display at the National Gallery. The most famous, The Ambassadors, is basically just a couple of fat guys standing around in all their finery, with a table between them on which a variety of spheres and measuring instruments have been placed. Each object, I don’t doubt, is terrifically symbolic. But the painting’s probably best known because of the hidden skull which is sort of smeared across the lower reaches and which you wouldn’t necessarily notice unless you knew it was there. If you put your eye right up to the edge of the frame the skull suddenly jumps out at you. It’s just a trick of perspective and, presumably, a little reminder about how we’re all of us mortal and how in the long run none of our material wealth is going to be any use to us – a fact which, strangely, I don’t need to be reminded of right now.
But that particular painting has never quite grabbed me. There’s another one, of some woman in a woollen bonnet, with a squirrel perched on one shoulder and various crows and magpies bobbing about the place, which always puts me in mind of Snow White where she yodels out of the kitchen window and gets all the woodland creatures to come and help her with the washing-up. Beyond that, as far as I can remember, Holbein’s output is just one long catalogue of kings and bishops and wealthy merchants – a cast of people not exactly guaranteed to set one’s heart going a-pit-a-pat.
And yet I know that there is most definitely something about old Holbein that truly moves me. I remember getting tremendously excited by the backgrounds to his portraits, which are painted in these incredible turquoises and electric blues, and seem altogether too modern for the sixteenth century. But I’d like to think that there’s a little more to it than that.
*
Something’s happened to my hair. Something to do with the texture. It’s sort of thickening up. Which I suppose is down to all the wind and salty air it’s been exposed to. Either that or all the weird stuff going on in my head.
I can’t say I mind that much. Just as long as it doesn’t end up getting all matted. Matted hair isn’t particularly flattering on a woman of my age.
Having noticed it, it’s crossed my mind on more than one occasion that woolly hair might be just another small step along the path towards me assuming the mantle of Wild Woman of the Saltmarshes. You know, the Anchorite look.
3.30 A.M.
How very disappointing. I’d been doing so well on the sleep front lately, and was under the impression that all those vaults buried deep inside of me, where my sleep is stored away, were gradually being replenished and that, inch by inch, I might be shifting from a state of near-capsize towards something more like equilibrium. But when I stirred half an hour ago I knew straight away that I was scuppered. And that if I carried on lying there I’d just end up tying myself in knots. So I thought I might as well get up and move about the place, and see if that did any good.
I’d made the mistake of thinking about the Holbein book again and how much I want to have it. Just to hold it. And, having fretted about that for a while, I remembered a fellow I once met at a dinner party, quite a few years ago now, who was a restorer and might even have been working at the National Gallery at the time. When I expressed some interest in his work he dipped a hand into an inside pocket, pulled out a small colour photograph and placed it on the table in front of me.
‘Any idea what that is?’ he said.
Of course, I hadn’t.
‘Caravaggio,’ he said. ‘The Way to Calvary.’
The reason I didn’t recognise it as a Caravaggio, or, for that matter, a figurative painting of any kind, was because the photograph consisted of nothing but a series of luminous gold and blue strata, like something chemical or even geological. Or a frame of film which has got caught in the projector, before burning up on the screen.
When he was satisfied that I was sufficiently bamboozled, he explained that it was actually a cross-section of the painting, viewed through a microscope, which he and his colleagues were analysing in order to identify the various pigments and layers of varnish and determine the precise order in which they’d been applied.
I’d never really given much thought to this notion of underpainting. And, to be honest, it took me a while to come to terms with the idea of someone slicing away at a Caravaggio, no matter how thin a sliver it might be. But as I listened to this restorer discuss his work I began to appreciate how a painting has a third dimension. And that, buried away beneath the surface, there might be an arm or leg which hadn’t quite worked in the overall composition and had been painted out, but with the help of a little X-ray or infrared could be revealed. And how a painting which we now see as fixed and as if it could only ever have been precisely what it is might, in fact, have stray limbs and indeed whole characters swimming about beneath the paint.
And as I lay in bed, thinking about all those lost limbs and faces, I remembered something I must have heard on the radio twenty years ago, about someone who claimed to have devised a way of analysing a painting’s individual brushstrokes so that they could extract from each one the words the artist had uttered at the moment the paint was applied.
Turning it over in my mind just now, I became convinced that the whole idea was utterly preposterous. And yet I distinctly remember hearing it. Or reading it in a magazine somewhere. I’m almost certain that it wasn’t fiction – i.e. simply some speculation about what scientists might be capable of doing in years to come. I heard someone discuss, in all seriousness, the art of carefully lifting a single brushstroke and, from the tiny vibrations captured in it, identifying the words of Rembrandt or Vermeer or Raphael, just as if it were a piece of audio tape.