Woman Triumphant | Page 6

see his work, he could not let him go away, they would lunch
together at the hotel where he lived. They would open a bottle of
Chianti to recall their life in Rome; they would talk of the merry
Bohemian days of their youth, of those comrades of various
nationalities that used to gather in the Café del Greco,--some already
dead, the rest scattered through Europe and America, a few celebrated,

the majority vegetating in the schools of their native land, dreaming of
a final masterpiece before which death would probably overtake them.
Renovales felt overcome by the insistence of the Hungarian, who
seized his hands with a dramatic expression, as though he would die at
a refusal. Good for the Chianti! They would lunch together, and while
Tekli was giving a few touches to his work, he would wait for him,
wandering through the Museo, renewing old memories.
When he returned to the Hall of Velásquez, the assemblage had
diminished; only the copyists remained bending over their canvases.
The painter felt anew the influence of the great master. He admired his
wonderful art, feeling at the same time the intense, historical sadness
that seemed to emanate from all of his work. Poor Don Diego! He was
born in the most melancholy period of Spanish history. His sane
realism was fitted to immortalize the human form in all its naked
beauty and fate had provided him a period when women looked like
turtles, with their heads and shoulders peeping out between the double
shell of their inflated gowns, and when men had a sacerdotal stiffness,
raising their dark, ill-washed heads above their gloomy garb. He had
painted what he saw; fear and hypocrisy were reflected in the eyes of
that world. In the jesters, fools and humpbacks immortalized by Don
Diego was revealed the forced merriment of a dying nation that must
needs find distraction in the monstrous and absurd. The hypochondriac
temper of a monarchy weak in body and fettered in spirit by the terrors
of hell, lived in all those masterpieces, that inspired at once admiration
and sadness. Alas for the artistic treasures wasted in immortalizing a
period which without Velásquez would have fallen into utter oblivion!
Renovales thought, too, of the man, comparing with a feeling of
remorse the great painter's life with the princely existence of the
modern masters. Ah, the munificence of kings, their protection of
artists, that people talked about in their enthusiasm for the past! He
thought of the peaceful Don Diego and his salary of three pesetas as
court painter, which he received only at rare intervals; of his glorious
name figuring among those of jesters and barbers in the list of members
of the king's household, forced to accept the office of appraiser of

masonry to improve his situation, of the shame and humiliation of his
last years in order to gain the Cross of Santiago, denying as a crime
before the tribunal of the Orders that he had received money for his
pictures, declaring with servile pride his position as servant of the king,
as though this title were superior to the glory of an artist. Happy days
of the present, blessed revolution of modern life, that dignifies the artist,
and places him under the protection of the public, an impersonal
sovereign that leaves the creator of beauty free and ends by even
following him in new-created paths!
Renovales went up to the central gallery in search of another of his
favorites. The works of Goya filled a large space on both walls. On one
side the portraits of the kings and queens of the Bourbon decadence;
heads of monarchs, or princes, crushed under their white wigs; sharp
feminine eyes, bloodless faces, with their hair combed in the form of a
tower. The two great painters had coincided in their lives with the
moral downfall of two dynasties. In the Hall of Velásquez the thin,
bony, fair-haired kings, of monastic grace and anæmic pallor, with their
protruding under-jaws, and in their eyes an expression of doubt and
fear for the salvation of their souls. Here, the corpulent, clumsy
monarchs, with their huge, heavy noses, fatefully pendulous, as though
by some mysterious relation they were dragging on the brain,
paralyzing its functions; their thick underlips, hanging in sensual inertia;
their eyes, calm as those of cattle, reflecting in their tranquil light
indifference for everything that did not directly concern their own
well-being. The Austrians, nervous, restless, vacillating with the fever
of insanity, riding on theatrical chargers, in dark landscapes, bounded
by the snowy crests of the Guadarrama, as sad, cold and crystallized as
the soul of the nation; the Bourbons, peaceful, adipose,
resting--surfeited--on their huge calves, without any other thought than
the hunt of the following day or the domestic intrigue that would