Particularly skilled in the depiction of silent crisis. His single gift is to make flame realistic but still lazily surreal enough to be congenial. Trivial, banal, quotidian cataclysm. He is no accomplished graduate of the previous generation — no Memling or Metsys, skilled in the unsurpassed stillness of reality. He holds up no perfectly burnished fidelity to the look of surprise. In verisimilitude, his eye is shaky. If the panels have any resonance, it comes from their perch over invention's chasm.
I've spent hours in front of each, acclimating, learning to read him. I have hypnotized myself in the process; his panels, undeniable Patinir derivatives, grow vastly if intangibly different. I stare at them, like Leonardo trancing out for hours on his spittle, until they become more than masterpieces — immense, jagged, Mani-chean battlegrounds between the real and the imagined. His expertise at depicting the imminent catastrophe waiting patiently at panel edge, tucked away in back rooms of huge art repositories, are scrolls that have waited four hundred years to tell one sleepy museumgoer that he hasn't the faintest idea of the apocalypse waiting in the front foyer.
I obsess on the idea that it is up to me, FTODD, to translate these sirens into terms my contemporaries can comprehend. I sit down to write, fired with conviction, but can get no father than "He became a master in Antwerp by 1535," before I bog down again in qualifications. Crippled by the clubfootnote. I attempt to make a case for his minor, desperate genius, and wind up trotting out that he was said to have enjoyed a friendship with Dürer, as if only this dubious acquaintance with the great Nuremberger might legitimize my fellow. What can I say about him that would be above dispute? That he may have ended his life in Ferrara, in the blessed South, some time around 1555.
The only indisputables are the fantastic, allegorical landscapes. The handful of scenes I've been able to find — after the years of authenticity debates have taken their toll — contain no stamp of flamboyance, heartbreak, or eschatological revelation, nothing to interest the armchair aesthete, no announcement for anyone except the ambivalent, diverted, ex-night-shift computer operator with two degrees from impeccable schools and two overextended credit cards. Man and work are unremarkable, irretrievable blurs— the perfect topic, in this age of reductionism, for a dissertation.
You loved the scenes, didn't you, when I first showed you them? A flat-out fascination with the threat, soberly maintaining that the only thing to do when the world begins to end is to stand aside and paint it. Uncover it. Name it. Your belief in the ability of words to intervene, even after intervention failed the three of us, keeps me here. The inarticulate love I have found for you, the chance that I might in some impossible future arrive on your threshold, paper in hand—
Every morning I wait for the museum library to open, and every afternoon I ask what the point is. I swear to God no one could possibly care. The utter irrelevance of foliage technique in the face of acid rain or Afghanistan or the ozone layer, the great foregone shoot-out: paint versus proof. Remember what the professor said, just before we committed to data-terrorism? "A talking cure must be transacted in the illness's own idiom." Who speaks art anymore? At its golden apex, it was already stilted discourse, a kind of leftover court lingo. Even at the supreme Quattrocento moment, the fablespeech of pictures was doomed by the creeping success of new prose. The year Herri was born, if I commit to one of the question marks, Leonardo invented the parachute. Herri (safe to assume) was born into the same zodiacal configuration as Magellan. The year Herri turned seven, astonished Dias, emerging from a storm, found he'd been blown off course around the Cape of Good Hope. New worlds, no longer the province of the land-scapist.
His fate was sealed early, apprenticed from youth, perhaps against his will, to a painter's factory, where he gained a modicum of skill in elevating ordinary countryside to travelogue. But no technique imaginable could match the travel reports then coming in. Even before Herri served out his apprenticeship, Columbus had made the most important miscalculation in history. By the time Herri flourished (your face, in front of me as I write the word), Europe was grudgingly accepting the absurd conclusion that a world existed between Here and There.
Let me be blunt: he was in the wrong line of work. That's why I sought him out, the patron saint of fallen-away technographers. He should have been on shipboard from the start. What he lacked in skill of hand he might have made up for in his demonstrated capacity for mental leaps. As fabulous first mate, he might have told Columbus, after weeks of skimming the north edge of Cuba: "This is just pitiful prologue. Think, man. Think big." Instead, the only chance of exploration life threw his way came at night, in the security of Antwerp's back streets, under cover of dark, annexing uncharted female isthmuses.
New skills, new materials, the sluiceways of travel thrown open: the man lived on the leading edge of an age of altered maps, radical overhauls: Copernicus's De Revolutionibus, apocalyptic showdown in the Church, Peasants' Revolution, Mercator's Most Exact
Description of Flanders. When a man can't himself taste the main enterprise of the day, it wrecks him for secondhand excitement. I speak as one who picked up just enough computer competence to get his name paraded through the papers for twenty-four hours.
Still, in Herri's brief flourishing, even an archaic skill provided vicarious thrill, a whiff of the spark that charged the old atmosphere. The printed word was suddenly everywhere, proliferate, vital, and at last affordable. Even art seemed sufficient, rich beyond imagining. New perspectives filtered up from Italy. Genres opened; vistas grew ambitious. Once over the threshold, it would never again be enough just to match the effect of the previous generation. All the attention once lavished on the past was now requisitioned by the unrealized future.
But possibility is only born in a blaze. Dross must be burnt off. The doors at Wittenberg got the stigmata, and there was no turning back. Art, once healing, was enlisted in the longer war. Painting, if bolder than ever, was no longer an authority on the question it had posed since the first cave scratchings: How did I come to be trapped here on earth, at the mercy of strangers? For a long time, pigment had given the answers. Now panelists were as bewildered as anyone.
Jan-o, if it weren't for the collector's thrill — the chance to sample the mythical auras of Ghent and Delft, cityscapes whose views I have wasted my life studying at second hand — I could not keep slogging pointlessly. Every day, between the novelty of new vocabulary and the art treasure map, I am consumed with the whole debacle, how badly I abused us. I miss you intensely, in my sleep. I miss the professor. I need to talk — one more late evening with the two of you. Why have we had to keep apart this year? Tell me exactly: what was it we tried to pull off? Oh, I know the motive, the virtue we made of necessity. I've kept the clippings, the accounts of how we walked away scot-free from the corporate mauling we had coming. But I've seemed to walk away with nothing except the unmistakable sound of missed calling.
Me and my Antwerp master: no better response to looming contemporarily than to set up on a distant hill and catch the conflagration in oils. While his fellow guild members inhaled the whiff of combustion, broadening their palettes, taking on the awful, widening world, Herri staked out a modest line of sight, reworked the Wallonia horizon — the same three-star valleys I traveled yesterday — until it became a jagged, escapist kingdom, more seductive because of the lazy threat hanging perennially about it. Perhaps he was the first modern, after all.