In fiction, weaving PAST and PRESENT has now been fashionable for decades. More than ever before, mysterious links emerge, drawing readers to characters across centuries. I just bought Dominic Smith’s new novel, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, ready to enjoy its plot. Soon, it’ll join my numerous art-history-based novels, Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pear Earring, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, as well as many other reaching back to when, years back, I first read Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy as well as “met” Vincent Van Gogh in Stone’s Lust for Life.
How many readers comment in their book reviews how much they enjoyed learning about art? No wonder. A picture is worth a thousand words (not to be trite).
So much information and emotion can be packed in a single image.
For an art historian these plots occur naturally, often solidly rooted in documentary evidence. But the actual, piquant story emerges while answering questions which cannot be supported by any sort of evidence. When I wrote my book Maddalena, I found a document illustrating the life of a major character, the Flemish artist Hans Speckaert. Related to his guild activity, it specified that he was “now paralyzed.” The most obvious reason for his paralysis would have been a fall from scaffolding, while painting frescoes in a church. In a good plot such interpretations, linked together like stray pieces of a puzzle, suddenly imbue the plot with drama and color.
Inspired by a still relatively recent exhibition of Bartholomaus Spranger at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I sat down and completed a manuscript of My Life With Berti Spranger in two months. It wasn’t difficult, since the plot was milling in my mind for years. The Flemish artist came close to being my choice for a Ph.D. dissertation at Princeton.
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Art historians will always find explanations, stories about art. I would have loved to have met the Spranger, to understand how he truly felt producing what essentially were lewd paintings in a time when no one has heard of Playboy magazine. I still talk to his portrait by my front door, as I leave and return home.
Unlike Dominic Smith’s plot of Sara de Vos’ painting, my book was based on MANY PAINTINGS that Spranger painted for his libertine master, the Habsburg emperor Rudolf II. Art historians have argued and will argue that the artist also produced images with religious subjects.
True. But, this is not the place to analyze what poses have inspired some of these sacred images. It seems that Spranger knew how to become rich.