My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
This was the way Bellori understood Christ in On the Nature of Angels. And that was how he’d understood him in the years since. But then he rises from the little pool in Padua, lifts his pack onto his back, takes his staff in hand, crosses to the chapel, and goes in. There he sees Giotto’s frescoes, which he has been looking forward to for a long time, and when he comes out again, everything has changed. Quickly, he retrieves his writing materials from his pack, scribbles down that we know nothing, and that there is nothing to know. For the next two years he doesn’t write a word.
What had he seen?
The chapel is still there, the frescoes still adorn the walls, anyone can go there and see what Bellori saw with his own eyes. The lamentation. The picture of a Christ who has just relinquished his spirit, as Mary kneels before him, while the angels above them seem to be breaking forth from the somber heavens. Their movements are violent and expressive, they fill the sky with motion and drama, in contrast to the lifeless Christ, the grieving Mary. The picture is condensed: there is redemption here, resignation, adoration, sorrow. It shows the moment when Jesus is most like us, he’s dying, he’s dying like a man, at the same time as he’s moving away from us, in an impossible movement, a reverse death, presence and absence at one and the same time, God and man.
What would Bellori have seen?
He would have seen the angels.
One of them closes his eyes, his mouth twisted in tears, as he clutches his face with both his hands, fingertips to his cheeks as if about to claw himself. Another is pictured in a strangely distorted posture, the upper half of his body lifted as if in ecstasy. A third opens his arms as if in embrace or surrender. The angels’ grief is frenzied. And Bellori couldn’t even have thought about it, it must just have flashed on his mind as a certainty the moment he saw them.
God was dead.
How frightened he must have been as he hurried out of Padua that evening. God had emptied himself into Christ and become man. And as a man he’d died. The angels alone remained, that was why they were insane with grief, and why their lives had altered so dramatically in the centuries that followed. God was dead on the cross, and the angels were imprisoned here.
Presumably Giotto himself painted the angels from the medieval concept that the angels never knew what lay in store for Jesus. That was what he thought. But thought’s truth is never the same as the picture’s truth. Bellori viewed them with all his knowledge, which, as regards angels, was probably the most extensive of his time, and he saw them with the ever-nagging question in his mind: Why were the angels captive here?
Now he knew the answer. But it brought him no satisfaction, no peace, no happiness. Just fear. And then sorrow. And then despair.
If he looked up at the night sky, with its infinity of shining stars, he thought that they were quite alone there. If he walked through the forest in the daytime, he thought that there was no meaning in anything. Why does the grass grow? Why do the flowers grow? Why do the trees grow? Why this desire in all living things to expand and multiply? What was it everything was grasping at? Why did calves bellow in their fear of death when they knew they were going to be slaughtered? Why did cornered rats attack creatures many times larger than themselves?
He saw the world as it was. Animals tore the throats out of other animals, growling and with breasts covered in blood they ate the recently living flesh. They mated, and out of them new animals came crawling, and out of those new animals, and out of those new animals again. All of them were filled with the fear of death when they were threatened, all of them did whatever was needed to keep themselves here and live on, live on. The leaves that burgeoned from the trees each spring, the grass that crept up as soon as there was a tiny chink in a flagstone floor, just grew and grew and grew.
The earth was a living hell. Everything lived, and everything wanted to go on living. But why? It was blind, it couldn’t see itself, it just was and it wanted more.
And the dead?
The dead returned like flies.
When Bellori committed these thoughts to paper, two years had elapsed since he’d thought them, and during that time a distance must have grown up between him and the world, because in most of what he wrote from that time on, there are elements of irony and cynicism, something his earlier writings show no trace of.
Apart from what he writes about the angels. About them he employs no irony whatever. Perhaps he sees them as some kind of final hope, perhaps it’s the purity of his childhood that he doesn’t want to desecrate.
I still fall to my knees and pray to them, he writes in February 1606. After all these years I still fall on my knees to them. After all these years I can still imagine them with shining clarity. Oh, that plaintive cry! Oh, those quivering hands! Oh, those lovely faces! Shall I never see them again?
Oh, most beautiful of creatures, will I really never see you again?
He is fifty-four years old, and has traipsed about wildernesses in search of angels for eighteen years. In the eyes of his fellow townsmen he is a figure of ridicule, and perhaps in his own, too, as, pencil in hand, he stands staring at his reflection in the open wardrobe door on the other side of the room. His skin is dark and weather-beaten, his face is thin, his nose almost aquiline. His long hair and beard are dark, like the cape that hangs about his shoulders, and his whole appearance would have made a somber, almost demonic impression had it not been for the eyes, which look on himself with amusement, and the smile on his lips, which is difficult to interpret as anything other than mocking. He knows only too well how his life appears to others, he has taken great pleasure in sketching mad Bellori alone in his study, surrounded by all his equipment and paraphernalia. The wall to the left of the mirror is covered in shelves, and among the many objects on them can easily be spotted a skull without a jawbone, a stuffed eagle, a grimacing Pan head made of alabaster, three ostrich eggs, some fossils, several corals, shells, stones, and minerals in marked cases (mariana, mineralia, metalla, sulphura, conchilliatav, it says on them), a miniature globe, a snakeskin, and a metal helmet; on the table behind him, just visible in the mirror, can be glimpsed an array of retorts and test tubes, while on the right of the wardrobe is a stuffed lynx with one paw raised, its head turned to the side and its gaze resting on the viewer.
The drawing is dated February 2, 1606, and it’s the only known picture of Bellori in existence. Interestingly enough there is a drawing of angels dated the same month among his posthumous manuscripts, in which the face of one, dimly illuminated by torchlight, bears a strong resemblance to Bellori’s. Whether he has drawn himself like an angel, or an angel like himself, is something we will never know. One of the most remarkable things about Antinous Bellori’s life is that we only have his word for it. Certainly his name figures in the church register of 1551, and then again in the rolls of the universities of Naples, Bologna, and Montpellier, where he studied, but always merely as a name among other names. In this, Bellori is reminiscent of one of his great contemporaries, William Shakespeare, who also left no traces other than those he created himself. And just as with Shakespeare, there are those who have questioned whether Bellori even existed at all. In the book The World That Never Was (1957), the two Oxford researchers Hampton and White launched the theory that Bellori is actually fictional, the posthumous papers a kind of novel. In the same way that Marlowe is supposed to have borrowed an insignificant actor’s name as a pseudonym when writing plays after his feigned death, Hampton and White believed that someone had used Bellori’s name to create a man in whose person the old and the new could meet. Thus the encyclopedic character of the manuscript, thus the smooth transitions between this world and the text, life and nonlife, thus Bellori’s constantly shifting character throughout the manuscript.