to be used. Great white squares of cloth-canvas-waited for the paint.
These boys didn't make their colors with the yoke of an egg in the time-honored manner. They mixed the bright fine ground pigments directly with the amber-colored oils. Great glossy gobs of color awaited me in little pots. I took the brush when they gave it to me. I looked at the stretched white cloth on which I was to paint.
"Not from human hands," I said. But what did these words mean? I lifted the brush and I began to paint him, this blond-haired man who had rescued me from darkness and squalor. I threw out the hand with the brush, dipping the bristles into the jars of cream and pink and white and slapping these colors onto the curiously resilient canvas. But I couldn't make a picture. No picture came!
"Not by human hands!" I whispered. I dropped the brush. I put my hands over my face.
I searched for the words in Greek. When I said them, several of the boys nodded, but they didn't grasp the meaning. How could I explain to them the catastrophe? I looked at my fingers. What had become of-. There all recollection burnt up and I was left suddenly with Amadeo.
"I can't do it." I stared at the canvas, at the mess of colors. "Maybe if it was wood, not cloth, I could do it."
What had it been that I could do? They didn't understand.
He was not the Living Lord, my Master, the blond one, the blond one with the icy blue eyes.
But he was my Lord. And I could not do this thing that was meant to be done.
To comfort me, to distract me, the boys took up their brushes and quickly astonished me with pictures that ran like a stream out of their quick applications of the brush.
A boy's face, cheeks, lips, eyes, yes, and reddish-golden hair in profusion. Good Lord, it was I... it was not a canvas but a mirror. It was this Amadeo. Riccardo took over to refine the expression, to deepen the eyes and work a sorcery on the tongue so I seemed about to speak. What was this rampant magic that made a boy appear out of nothing, most natural, at a casual angle, with knitted brows and streaks of unkempt hair over his ear?
It seemed both blasphemous and beautiful, this fluid, abandoned fleshly figure.
Riccardo spelled the letters out in Greek as he wrote them. Then he threw the brush down. He cried:
"A very different picture is what our Master has in mind." He snatched up the drawings.
They pulled me through the house, the "palazzo" as they called it, teaching me the word with relish.
The entire place was filled with such paintings-on its walls, its ceilings, on panels and canvases stacked against each other-towering pictures full of ruined buildings, broken columns, rampant greenery, distant mountains and an endless stream of busy people with flushed faces, their luxuriant hair and gorgeous clothing always rumpled and curling in a wind.
It was like the big platters of fruit and meats that they brought out and set before me. A mad disorder, an abundance for the sake of itself, a great drench of colors and shapes. It was like the wine, too sweet and light.
IT WAS LIKE the city below when they threw open the windows, and I saw the small black boats-gondolas, even then-in brilliant sunlight coursing through the greenish waters, when I saw the men in their sumptuous scarlet or gold cloaks hurrying along the quays.
Into our gondolas we piled, a troop of us, and suddenly we traveled in graceful darting silence among the facades, each huge house as magnificent as a Cathedral, with its narrow pointed arches, its lotus windows, its covering of gleaming white stone.
Even the older, sorrier dwellings, not too ornate but nevertheless monstrous in size, were plastered in colors, a rose so deep it seemed to come from crushed petals, a green so thick it seemed to have been mixed from the opaque water itself.
Out into the Piazza San Marco we came, amid the long fantastically regular arcades on both sides.
It seemed the very gathering place of Heaven as I stared at the hundreds milling before the distant golden domes of the church.
Golden domes. Golden domes.
Some old tale had been told to me of golden domes, and I had seen them in a darkling picture, had I not? Sacred domes, lost domes, domes in flames, a church violated, as I had been violated. Ah, ruin,