This past April I was supposed to be in London, where I was looking forward to seeing the Artemisia show at the National Gallery, the overdue vindication of a great Baroque painter. I had only ever seen glimpses of her work in person, particularly the wonderful Judith Beheading Holofernes in Naples—a painting that I now think is even better, more psychologically astute, than the famous Caravaggio picture of the same subject, even as I think that generally no artist surpasses Caravaggio for psychological insight. But the epidemic intervened, and what I had desired was forced to remain desire unfulfilled, floating free, disembodied, unconsummated, the blessed almost, something I’ve come to think may be the best thing that can happen to these longings. Instead, I ordered the catalogue of the exhibition and have spent happy hours turning the pages, which, I’ll have to confess, has always been my preferred way of seeing art: at a remove, with this subtraction of the real thing, a void filled by the inherent desire to see it, strangely satisfied by seeing it merely reproduced, an avatar of itself. I can rarely stand in front of a great painting and feel entirely that I am in its presence. Only in the recollection does the painting then become itself, the real thing, once it is no longer here.
The way I became something of a comical connoisseur of these pleasures of missing out took place some years ago in Verona. Flipping through a guidebook, I learned that not very far away, at Sirmione on Lake Garda, the ruined villa of Catullus stood. I couldn’t believe it. I loved the poet but had never heard, or else had forgotten, that his house could be seen. Immediately we looked at the map, decided on a plan, and departed. It looked easy. We would take a train to Peschiera, from whence we would walk along the waterfront to Sirmione and the villa. This turned out to be less straightforward than it seemed on the map. We arrived in Peschiera in the afternoon and could see the faint, mirage-like glow of Sirmione in the distance as we made our way toward it; but the shore became intractable soon enough, so we headed inland for the road, which was baking, and charmless. Sirmione was farther away than we thought. We tried to wait for a bus, which never came, so we pushed on, only to see the bus pass by us. This happened more than once. At long last, after a couple hours of this dispiriting slog, we walked into Sirmione. At a newsagent’s kiosk near the castle beyond which the ruins lay, we asked when the last bus for Peschiera left, and the woman said in fifteen minutes. We walked over and sat on a bench near the entrance to the villa to wait for the bus, and we watched the pink opalescence of early evening gleaming over the lake, and we laughed, hysterically laughed, at the desire, and at the perfect ruin of our pursuit. To this day I have not seen the ruins of Catullus’s villa.
Ever since that day, I’ve been acutely aware of the value of this kind of denial. This is probably why I’ve lately been contemplating writing a book about one of the (for me) emblematic moments of this blessed almost in the history of art, the story of the last days of the Danish Golden Age painter Wilhelm Bendz, who died in 1832 at twenty-eight.
Like most young painters of the day, he had long wanted to come to Rome—to see the world of antiquity, to learn what could be learned from its ruins, its art, and its landscape—and when at long last he received a travel grant from the state, he slowly made his way down through Germany, lingered in Munich for a year, and then finally, in the fall of 1832, crossed the mountains on foot, which took more than a month. He arrived in Trieste somewhat the worse for wear. From here he booked passage to Venice, a short but difficult voyage, especially as he only had a deck ticket, so that by the time the boat arrived in Venice, Bendz’s health was seriously undermined.
Days later, he decided to push on to Rome via Padua and Vicenza. In Vicenza his condition worsened. His friend and traveling companion, Ditlev Blunck, writing some weeks later in Rome, described the last days of Bendz, including his ominous dreams (struggling with a giant bat) and hallucinations (he kept trying to enter a boat which he thought was tied to his bedpost, and kept telling Blunck to cut the rope). It was only on the night of November 13, Blunck says, that Bendz had an intimation of his own death, when he was wakened from his slumbers by the “constant crying of a dog outside the windows,” at which he burst into tears and said, “Why do I have to die so young…with that poor unhappy Marie [his fiancée] and my poor old mother.” He died the next day, three hundred miles from Rome.
There is a drawing by him, moving in the context of his end, done in Copenhagen six or seven years earlier, depicting a group of friends, himself included, resting by a road, with the cupola of St Peter’s gleaming in the background: a vision of his future trip, a small down payment on a journey forever incomplete.
About eighteen months after Bendz’s death, Hans Christian Andersen, who was a year younger and knew him somewhat, came to Vicenza. One of the things he definitely wanted to do in the city was to visit the grave of poor Bendz, and so he asked his hired guide to take him to it. They went, Andersen writes in his diary (23 April 1834), to the cemetery, but they could not find the grave, which, he laments, he “so wanted to visit.”
This strikes me, from this privileged distance (and perhaps as a mere avatar of the thing itself), as terribly beautiful.
Elvis Bego was born in Bosnia and at present lives in Copenhagen, where he is at work on a novel.
