They sat outside in saddened defeat, Dominic disappointed in the mist and rain of their alienation and Benedict furious enough to turn it all to steam, so that he never really got wet.
A day and a half later, Presbyter Cornelius was told of their existence and they were allowed inside to dry out and be recognized.
Cornelius looked as if he had never been outside stately homes, rich cloistered walls, and sanctified libraries. His fingers curled and uncurled constantly, like two separate creatures trying to escape an invisible web of unparalleled stickiness. He walked around the two outcasts, stroking his chin, deaf to Benedict’s rambling explanations.
Suddenly he commanded a nearby servant, “Give them food and warm water, clean clothing, and find them a bed. Tomorrow, bring them to the chapel.”
Benedict thanked him.
“I would not allow anything as filthy as you within ten feet of our masterworks, and that would include the Sacred Baptist himself.”
The fresh water, new soap, and soft towels were unlike anything Dominic had experienced. The youth was delighted, even when they rubbed and stung against the bites and scratches on his pale skin. Gradually, a glow of redemption hummed about their clean bodies as they warmed themselves around the narrow fire in the closed stable where they would sleep. The wind outside rattled the slatted door, but brought no nightmares to their modest security.
In the morning, they were ushered into the lofty chapel to set eyes on the fabled icon. The servant who had brought them to the door disappeared the moment they were inside. The scent of an incense unfamiliar to them gave another kind of depth to the darkness sporadically illuminated by flocks of candles in elegant gold holders. They knew they were not alone because they could hear Presbyter Cornelius giving instructions and orders in a tone that had nothing to do with prayer.
They quietly homed in on its squeaking, insistent whine. Cornelius was in a side chapel, which looked more like a stable than a place of worship. He and three other monks were standing around a wooden box and a heap of straw packing. Behind them glowed a painting resting on a large black easel. The dark silhouettes moved back and forth, crossing its illumination without paying it any heed.
The painting made Benedict walk on his toes, as if he did not want to disturb the scene: a sunlit landscape of yellow fields and lush green woodland. The foreground was occupied by an old man in prayer or meditation beneath a dried hollow of a tree. A pig slept next to his tranquil form. The painting made Benedict stop moving. He knew instantly that the old man was Saint Anthony of Thebes, Saint Anthony the Great, the anchorite father of all monks. A marvelous warmth flooded into the old monk; he was overwhelmed, as though he had come face-to-face with the saint himself.
Dominic, who was at Benedict’s side, felt the change in his master but knew not to question him at this time. As Benedict stared at the painting, his analytical mind joined with his compassion; he began to understand why this work was so powerful. The secret was in its contradictions. A survivor of starvation, sun, and temptation, the hermetic father was always depicted in a harsh wilderness or in a cave where devils taunted him ceaselessly. But here he sat on soft green turf beside a gentle brook, like an old peasant fishing and dozing. Benedict walked closer, impervious to the nonstop chatter of the nearby presbyter and still unseen by those working there. His concentration and the unworldliness of the painting had combined to render his revelation invisible.
In the farthest distance stretched a celestial blue sky, and beneath it rose steeples and a cliff-like structure. Below them, and running into the middle ground, yellow fields were dominated by a white church with a blue gathered roof like a maid’s hat and a stable beside it. The realism of the artist’s vision was astonishing. Benedict imagined himself crossing the little bridge and entering the larch gate that bore a tau, the symbol identical to the one on the Great Saint’s cassock. Then Benedict noticed the other folk in the picture, casually going about their daily business, carrying ladders and shields. But they were not normal villagers; they were identical to the things that had been materializing in the streets and fields around his home, his monastery. Some appeared to be minor demons, but ones that were not found in any bestiaries or grimoires he had consulted, although they were hinted at in the Voynich manuscript and, indeed, in the descriptions of the savage excesses of this artist’s other paintings. Benedict stepped forward again and this time nearly touched the box the others were working on. Presbyter Cornelius stopped jabbering, and the whole chapel listened to the resounding silence.
Then Benedict saw that they were indeed demons, but they were unlike the savage clawed horrors he had seen elsewhere. These were almost comical. Their monstrous intentions were subdued while they grinned and picked at the saint’s composure. The most violent action was the threatening of his dozing pig or the pouring of water or oil near the tree, behind his back. What was happening? Had the saint found tranquility in this gentle landscape after all his perils?
Dominic wandered into his view and blocked the painting, peering intently at its center. Benedict, irritated by this rude interruption, was just about to say something when the boy asked, “What’s that? It looks like a fire at the back of the church.”
“I can’t see anything if you stand in front of me.”
“Sorry, Master, it’s just that it is the eye of the painting.”
“Eye?”
“Like the eye of a storm.”
Benedict looked closer at the scene and realized that it was exactly that—poised. He examined what the boy had seen behind the church. Then he saw the alarm bell in the tree. This moment of revelation was broken by the barking Presbyter Cornelius.
“This is not what you are here to see,” he snapped. “We have important business here and cannot be bothered or disturbed by visitors. What you have come to see is over there,” he said, fluttering his hand toward the other side of chapel.
Benedict tore his eyes from the painting and stared long and hard into the presbyter’s twitching face.
“Very well, but what is this?” he asked in cautious, rigid words.
The presbyter took a deep, irritated breath, which he would release only once.
“It is, of course, also by Jheronimus van Aken, or so they say! We are sending it back to the Inquisition for safekeeping. It is merely resting here during its passage.”
“Is there any doubt about its authorship?” asked Benedict. The question seemed to enrage its temporary keeper even further.
“Not really. Some even say it is the artist’s last work, that he died finishing it. I find that questionable. It seems far too quiet, too gentle compared to the epic artistry of his other work. Especially the one you have come here to see.”
Cornelius gathered himself, becoming taller, and held out his arm in a matador posture that signaled their moving away. Dominic understood this gesture and led the way. Just before he left, Benedict turned back to scrutinize the detail Dominic had seen in this “gentle” painting, and there it was. Squeezed into a tiny gap between the hollow tree and the bottom right-hand corner of the church—a tiny bright light, a glow of fire. Compositionally, it flickered between the blind side of the church and the woodland behind it. But in the flattened perspective of the painting, the fire also sat just beneath the dry sheaf of straw, which was threaded through the desiccated tree to give shade to the saint below. This one brushstroke undid the apparent peace of the picture and made it a tinderbox of tension. It was the moment before the total conflagration that would devour the entire landscape and turn its gentleness into ash.
Benedict understood enough about painting to know that such a bright detail would have been added last. If this really was the artist’s final work, then he was now staring at the essence of a vision, a signing in time. One tiny stroke, a lick of paint. A sable flame.
To suggest a localized Armageddon in the near future. To show such a possibility in a tiny detail that most would never notice…and in the artist’s last breath. This was the end of the world set in miniature. It was not a graphic depiction of total destruction but a seed, a whisper, a waiting. A suggestion. What kind of artist was this?
Dominic had been led to the large painting on the other side of the chapel. He stood gnawing on his index finger, his eyes wide as he tried to see all that was within the radiant rectangle. Benedict now joined him but seemed lost in thought. Cornelius stood several paces behind them, alert to any potential indignity, arms folded, hands still working in their cuffs. His bitter eyes caught glints from a series of perfectly trimmed candles that illuminated the painting without a flicker. This was just as well, because any more spluttering agitation in the picture would have sent its viewers stampeding for the door.
The painting dominated the farthest wall of the dark chapel. The movement that seethed inside the contours of the frame seemed twice the size of the actual picture. Its density, detail, and power spilled out of its dimensions. Benedict’s eyes had finally settled, and now the painting was looking at him. Dominic remained the same, incapable of understanding. The young monk had only ever seen a few pictures before, and they had been mainly the tiny near-abstract embellishments in illuminated manuscripts or the occasional inn sign, rough in depiction and execution. The church artworks that dwelled in his monastery were indistinct renditions of the crucifixion, encrusted with smoke and disinterest. After these dull facsimiles, any kind of pictorial version of the world would have nailed his attention. But the Nassau panel opened his eyes and tormented any understanding he had held about reality and artifice. His visual cortex was swelling dangerously; it strained and tangled the confining membranes of normality around it. In colors brighter and clearer than he had ever seen, an impossible world delineated itself in searing truth. A swarm of comic, bloodcurdling creatures was setting about a clutter of undressed people. He had never seen such nakedness. The white, strewn bodies were calm in their defeat; an exalted indifference, far beyond passivity, amplified their vulnerability, as they limply awaited the arousal of their torture. Nothing like this had ever pierced his eyes.
But the worst feature was the background of the painting. The nightmare orgy of unimagined clarity was occurring in a landscape he recognized. The muddy earth and the brown crumbling wall, the stunted trees were all signatures of his homeland. He even thought he could identify a turnstile or gate if he dared look that closely. The things that scurried in the foreground cast their shadows on the contours of everything he had ever known. The languid naked figures were hanging in trees identical to those he had climbed as a boy. Their skewering and debauchery were snuggling into the folds and furrows of the gardens and turnip fields that had belonged to his parents, and to their parents before them.
Amid this fearful revelation was another looming possibility. Was the world really like this? And was he in some way deficient in not seeing it as it was? Because this painting was true, so conspicuously observed from nature, no artist could invent nightmares that cast such genuine shadows. Had his church blinded him to what really roamed the wide world and the confines of his own pastures?
Benedict was unaware of his comrade’s anguish. His real consideration was still locked with Saint Anthony. And he knew it would not be dispersed, much like the nameless residue clinging to vessels that once contained pure substance, as the alembic process distilled the obvious to its essence and then to something else. All he could do was gently nod and reply very quietly to any question with a simple “Um. Yes!”
“It is, of course, a masterwork of perspectival composition.”
The words came from another universe and meant nothing.
“And the rendition of the phantasmagorical far exceeds all the artist’s previous works, a positive ascent into stylistic maturity. Pay attention to the brushmanship: a sharper, terser touch, with much more command than before. A mastery of fine brush-point calligraphy, permitting subtle nuances of contour and movement, is it not evident?”
Presbyter Cornelius had closed his eyes to concentrate on his own erudition, and his quill-like fingers helped expel the still-blind words with the impatience of a damp, ruffled cuckoo. He was in mid-crescendo when Dominic took one step closer and pointed with a shaking hand.
“It’s the one; it’s the one you met.”
Nobody paid much attention until he actually touched the canvas.
“There, that one.”
“Get away from the picture,” Cornelius hissed, his hands now like moth and flame.
The old monk leaned closer, at the young monk’s insistence, and saw, perched high up near an overturned dog kennel, a creature, which in the fine brushwork shadow, did indeed look like the pumpkin monstrosity that had hurt him so.
“It’s the one; it’s the one,” sang Dominic, turning his attention away from the transfixed old man and explaining to the furious, looming keeper. “We know this one. It came to our monastery and took hold of my master.”
Cornelius ignored this nonsense. He wanted these foolish peasants to acknowledge his distress and cringe under his reprimand.
Benedict spoke without his eyes leaving the painting and the pumpkin-like figure skulking there. “There is fear amongst some of our community that the fevered imaginations of this artist, and some others, have escaped to spawn a calamity of actuals in our lands,” he explained, and in a different tone concluded, “and that veracity has been born underhand.”
“Actuals?” fluted Cornelius.
“Like this one.”
Dominic pointed again, his twitching finger within inches of the flat canvas and Benedict’s face. “This is the one that escaped in our kitchen.”
Cornelius’s scholastic sphincter tightened. He would waste no more of his precious knowledge trying to educate these lunatic bumpkins.
“I don’t understand what you are saying. This work of art has nothing to do with freaks of nature, or any other kind of farmyard mutations you might have seen.”
“But it is identical—”
“Not quite, there are different blemishes of the skin, and the arms are more masculine,” interrupted Benedict.
The young monk could not believe that the old man’s pedantic observations were about to lose the argument, so again he pushed his point.
“But it is the same animal in a way that a cow is a cow and a dog is a dog.”
Benedict quietly agreed and turned his head as if trying to see around the painted body of the leaping figure.
“Preposterous, preposterous,” inflicted Cornelius, his hands taking on the ruffling of starlings, which squabbled and stabbed their now-carrion nature toward the contours of rooks and crows.
Dominic ignored the insults and pressed his case. “Where was this picture made?”
“What do you mean?”
“In what part of the Lowlands did the artist find these things?”
“ ‘Find’?”
“I ask because I think I know this wall.” Again, his finger touched the pigment.
“Don’t touch it, ever!”
“But I think I did, I think I climbed it.”
And as if to give physical emphasis, the young monk’s finger rubbed up and down over the painted bricks. This was too much for the presbyter: talons suddenly sharpened, dived, and impaled Dominic’s shoulders, but instead of lifting him out and away from the painting, the presbyter’s momentum made Dominic lurch forward, the innocent finger bludgeoned against the canvas. Its nail furrowed a perfect curl of paint from the gentle, recognized wall.
Cornelius screeched in horror, falling to his knees, his hawks turning into doves as they moved to soothe and bless the abused picture. The old monk took his confused comrade by the elbow and guided him out of the room. The stern candles remained aloof and unblinking at such poor, human behavior.
On their way out, Benedict and Dominic passed the place where the empty easel stood. The wooden box with its precious cargo of Saint Anthony, and the conceptual firestorm, was packed in straw and heading south, and would never be seen in these lands again.
Something had happened within the old monk; he was quiet in a different way. Dominic had seen him in deep study before when he was not to be disturbed. He had also witnessed Benedict in a stern and terrifying silence, when the old man was fighting his own rage over the stupidity of others. And, of course, Dominic had seen him in the concentrated stillness of prayer.
But now there was a softness in Benedict’s quietude. As if he were using a different part of his mind, a part that had never been witnessed inside the monastery walls. Whatever this was, the young monk knew better than to disturb him in his contemplations. So the air between them remained crisp but warm until Benedict said, “Tell me, do you think the artist who made those works was possessed by a vision of evil?”
This was an astonishing question, and the entrustment it bestowed on Dominic was overwhelming. So much so that it took a good while for him to answer.
Benedict smiled, as if in approval of Dominic’s pondering. This was indeed a great change.
“No, Master,” Dominic eventually stuttered. “Although the creatures painted in these works are disturbing, I do not believe their purpose and invention is to taunt the faithful into sin. And the given talent of the artist cannot be a property of Satan, because it is too fine in its execution and too wondrous in its surprise.”
“Excellent,” announced the stunned monk.
“You have the wisdom of innocence in your fresh mind. But might not that very quality of brushmanship be a ruse, a trick of the devil, to ensnare the viewer in its glamour?”
“No, Master, because all such gifts come directly from God, and any other version of them would be base and counterfeit; obvious in its usury.”
“My son, you give an old man hope in a weary world.”
Dominic was delighted at such praise and was just about to continue the debate when Benedict suddenly announced, “We will leave this wretched place at dawn.”
“After morning prayers?”
“No, before them—we will pray on the road. Nobody prays here.”
The annoyed soldiers let them out before the first light had touched the throats of the birds. The cold folded their bodies inward, their arms enclosed across their chests, their heads down as they headed out from the shadow of the citadel. The curl of paint in Dominic’s clenched fist had remained hidden, safe from the presbyter’s anger, and was now tucked deep in a pocket, the only thing about the two men that stayed almost warm. Dominic hoped it would be a talisman to secure a safe passage home. A good-luck charm to their comradeship and solid proof of their witness of an impossible and wonderful thing.
As soon as they cleared the outskirts of the citadel’s domain, they looked for shelter and waited for the rising sun to warm the new day. Four hours later, their prayers were answered and most of the cold was subdued by a brightening sky. The road home now seemed urgent, and they took to it with surprising fortitude. It took another hour before they felt able to talk again.
“Master, will we be back in time to see the arrival of the Oracle?”
“It is hoped so. That would be an important thing to witness, but it also depends on the length and quality of its journey to us.” After a pause and some facial adjustment, Benedict continued, “And the will and purpose of Abbot Clementine.”
“Surely the abbot will be pleased with our expedition after we report our findings?”
“That remains to be seen. He might decide that we have discovered too much.”
Their damp cloaks were steaming in the sunlight and their rough path had a gentle decline, which seemed to make walking easier.
“Why would he think about new knowledge that way?”
“Because he has done so before. When he discovered that I had accidentally found a cryptic document and successfully translated it, he was furious and made unpleasant allegations before confiscating both the document and my rendition.”
“The abbot cannot blame you for something that you found by mistake. He cannot punish you for stumbling over obscure facts.”
“ ‘Stumbling’!”
Benedict stopped walking in a shudder of rage, and his hand leaped up to help his face.
“I mean discovered by accident.”
“There is nothigf accidentalf or loutishf about the discofery of new wisdom or the purposeful excavation of ancient knowledge. A true scholar is led to these understandings by divine grace and a trained methodology, not by blind luck. It’s only the malign application for self-gain that is so despicable.”
“Apologies, Master, I was only responding to your assertion that you were not seeking problematic doctrines.”
The old man was about to spit fireballs again; then he swallowed and considered. He lowered his hands and breathed the new words fiercely, but without flames, slowly so even a dunce might understand.
“Inspiration often comes unexpectedly. A true scholar must train himself in the recognition of it and how he might coax results from its surprise.”
He gulped again and reshaped his mouth.
“There are nuances between words and dates, histories and statements that nudge in unexpected directions. Tiny ungainly shrugs and whispers suggesting opposites to what is formally preached in the sentences of the document. These glimpses and tracks have a way of explaining what may not be openly said. Sometimes they have been inserted by cunning scribes to catch the attention of similar minds. Sometimes they escape from the writer’s concentration. The new scholar must open himself to shifts of language at the very center of the composition.
“Exactly like the paintings we have just seen. The artists, taking the talents that God gave them, paint new images and let their creative skills be not fettled by limp-minded bureaucrats who know nothing of the gift of intelligent imagination. They must hold their talents in a loose and flexible way so the work may evolve around the idea that generated it.”
The old monk was again pleased with his erudite mitigation to the dull boy. His patience had been worthwhile, and he had also accidentally illuminated his own purpose. He must act on what he knew to be true. Something about the confrontation of this painting had strengthened his resolve and his own need to confront.
He was about to permit himself a smile when Dominic said, “But, Master, that’s what the presbyter said about the painting and the artist’s skills!”
The sound of small stones being turned to powder under the old monk’s sandals was the only thing that filled the time before he spoke, or rather spat, again.
“That moronic paiderastïs knows nothing of artf. He only burbled about craft. Brushmanship is nothing to do with fvision, talent, or purposfe. Brusfmafship is the obsferfation of a weak-brained elitist that God pafsed by when the talentfs were being gifen to the worfy. He should not be allowed anywhere near a painfing or a bookf, he should be afsigned to swilling out the pigfs after hafing his ridiculous manicured fingerf crushfed in a wfine presf.”
Spittle had gathered in the corners of the good master’s mouth, and he savagely wiped at it with the back of his shaking hand. Then he lurched forward, leaving the stunned Dominic still standing in his dust and with the sound of “Bruffmanfhif!” still being spat onto the path beyond.