Arnon Grunberg

Barbers

Painting

On Mann and Venice and the crucifixion – Colm Tóibín in LRB:

‘As a good Catholic, I like the Crucifixion; indeed, I prefer it to the Resurrection, which always seems a bit too staged.’

(…)

‘I wonder if I am alone in still liking Death in Venice, even in Helen Lowe-Porter’s translation. It has become common not to approve of her translations of Mann. This dislike may be exacerbated by the knowledge that she is the great-grandmother of Boris Johnson. Mann’s story has many small details – losing the luggage, the appearance of the old roué, the dishonest gondolier – that tally with Katia’s memory. Mann’s putting death and pestilence beside all the desire bubbling away in his protagonist Aschenbach satisfied some set of deep longings in his own nature. He loved disease and he could not stop thinking about sex; he was especially content, his diaries tell us, when dreaming about young men.
It is fascinating to watch him spread his own heightened fear of the exotic, feverish world beyond Europe as if mentioning the very names of the places would freeze the blood: For the past several years Asiatic cholera had shown a strong tendency to spread. Its source was the hot, moist swamps of the delta of the Ganges, where it bred in the mephitic air of that primeval island-jungle, among whose bamboo thickets the tiger crouches, where life of every sort flourishes in rankest abundance, and only man avoids the spot. Thence the pestilence had spread throughout Hindustan, raging with great violence; moved eastwards to China, westwards to Afghanistan and Persia; following the great caravan routes, it brought terror to Astrakhan, terror to Moscow.
In the light of all this mephitic terror, it was a relief to have my temperature taken the next day when I returned to the Accademia. I had another plague on my mind, almost as a way of keeping away the one raging outside and perhaps even inside the gallery, although it was mainly empty. This plague happened in Venice in the last months of Titian’s life and is vividly evoked in ‘The Plague and the Pity’, the last chapter of Sheila Hale’s biography of the painter.
Between August 1575 and the following February, there were 3696 plague deaths in Venice, about 2 per cent of the population. Most of the cases were ‘in the slums and the crowded ghetto’, Hale writes. Soon, however, the authorities relaxed, lifting the ban on crowds, manufacturing and trade. But then fatalities rose again. The doge invited two medical experts to explain that ‘the infection was not plague but a famine fever that affected only the undernourished poor.’ A few days later, these experts were proved wrong when ‘the contagion spread like wildfire into the houses of rich and poor alike.’ ‘Doctors,’ Hale writes, ‘circulating the city in gondolas followed by barbers and Jesuit priests, took pulses, lanced boils, applied leeches and spread the contagion by marking the doors of contaminated houses with the infected blood of their patients.’ By the time the plague ended, it had done away with a quarter of the population of Venice.
Titian stayed in the city during the pestilence. He was at least 86; he might have been even older. He may have laboured on a number of paintings, but he definitely worked on one – the Pietà in the Accademia. Hale sees this as a quintessential piece of late work: ‘It is a commemoration of his artistic life, a dialogue with the paintings, sculptures and architecture that had nourished his genius, a final declaration of the capacity of paint to represent and improve upon stone sculpture, and a testament to his devotion to Christ and his mother Mary.’ Titian put a tiny portrait of himself and his son, a sort of token, under the lion in the right-hand corner. He died of fever in the middle of the plague. There is an account of a ‘long and elaborate’ funeral service, but it did not take place. He was carried through the plague-ridden city to the Frari and buried there. Soon afterwards, his son died of the plague.’

Read the article here.

The resurrection is a bit staged, indeed. But Gustav von Aschenbach is all about appearances, art, love and even death, the appearance is everything, underneath the appearance the chaos and the bodily fluids simmer.
The comfort of the crucifixion consists mainly of good old heroism.
The comfort of Von Aschenbach consists of bourgeois ideas in a pleasant décor, and no, this is no criticism of bourgeois ideals.

discuss on facebook