Instead of working on my writing, I decided spontaneously to go to the National Gallery. Because it was the middle of a weekday, there was only a short queue to get in. A girl in front of me in the queue was reading a book called Respectable Sins: Confronting the Sins We Tolerate; I felt that in Trafalgar Square, which is full of tourists and, as John Berger wrote, is oddly indifferent to history, this seemed like a very serious thing to be reading.
In April there was a piece in the New Yorker about a secret society of art appreciators who organise trips to museums, stare at an artwork for half an hour, and then leave.1 Their idea was to counteract the shrinking of our attention spans. But the overwhelming response I saw from art professionals (historians, critics, whoever else) was something like: ‘half an hour is nothing!’ This was a little embarrassing for me: though I didn’t admit it, I could probably count on one hand the number of artworks I have stared at uninterruptedly for half an hour.
I decided that in the gallery I would find just one or two paintings that caught my attention—and caught it naturally, the way a face stands out to you in a crowd—and dedicate my time only to them. In the end I looked at two paintings: Pieter de Hooch’s The Courtyard of a House in Delft (1658), and Tobias and the Angel (1470-5), from the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio. On reflection I don’t think there is much in common between these two pictures, and I am sure that part of the reason they caught my attention is that I had seen both of them before—but I also notice that both of them have their principal figures facing towards each other, and both of them (if I blur my eyes) show me distinct reds and blues standing out amidst more earthen colours.
In my notebook I wrote down what I noticed about the pictures. There was nowhere to sit, and my handwriting was scratchy. When I eventually left the museum, I sat by the fountains in the square and continued to write. Like in Descartes’ Meditations, or perhaps like Freud describes in The Interpretation of Dreams, I was trying to pay attention to whatever came to my mind. Nearly everything I wrote concerned Verrocchio’s picture of Tobias and the Angel.
The picture tells the apocryphal story of Tobias, whose father Tobit is blinded by sparrows. Tobias is sent by his father to collect some money, and when Tobias looks for a man to accompany him on his journey, the archangel Raphael appears, calling himself Azarias for disguise. On their journey, Raphael shows Tobias how the bile of a fish will cure his father’s blindness. You can see this fish, and the little box that contains its bile, in Verrocchio’s picture.
All four hands in this painting are touching something, and all of them have an incredibly light touch. Holding a box, a hand, a cloak, and a scroll, they are like the careful hands of pickpockets, like in Robert Bresson’s films. As it seems to me, the angel is more determined in walking ahead: his heels are off the ground and his left foot seems to point forwards. (Follow its line backwards, and you follow the wind that is puffing up Tobias’s cape behind him. Trace a line from the tip of that cape to the angel’s halo, and you have drawn the triangle that structures the painting.) By comparison, Tobias looks to be holding back. The angel’s eyes are focused on the box, which is practically weightless in his fingers, but Tobias’s eyes are on him. Both of them are quite androgynous, their appearance ageless.
The way Raphael lifts his cloak, it also seems weightless. Look closely: can we be sure that his fingers are really touching it? His whole body, all of its weight supported by his toes, is as light in the air as Tobias’s dog by his side, who is so airy (I wrote ‘effervescent’—not the right word) that he is basically translucent. Compare him to the fish, the other animal in the picture, whose dead weight hangs bulkily from a piece of string.
It is just these two. There isn’t another human soul in sight, and I can see only a small few signs of other people’s existence—a castle, a path in the distance.
Sat by the fountains, I realised that I hadn’t come to any conclusiosn about my thoughts at all. Nonetheless, I started to write again, and found myself drawn obsessively to the hands in Tobias and the Angel. The face and the hands are the most expressive parts of our bodies. But we cannot see our own faces; and so, from the first-person perspective, our hands are what we can be sure of. In this painting, don’t the hands tell us even more than the faces? Or, at least, can’t we be more certain of what they tell us? Though it is possible, it is very difficult to lie with your hands. (That is the skill of pickpockets and magicians.)
Philosophers, who spend so much time alone, have to rely on their hands. ‘Here is one hand, and here is another’, G.E. Moore wrote, and took himself to have proven the existence of the external world: hands as the surest sign of knowledge. Kant was fascinated by the way his left and right hands were both the same and different. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, touching his left hand with his right, noticed how he then alternated between perceiver and perceived—as if self-consciousness and anxiety might be born in the tactility of a touch. But what about this touch? What philosophical explanation is there for what’s going on between Tobias and the angel?
I could worship my hand even, with its fan of bones laced by blue mysterious veins and its astonishing look of aptness, suppleness and ability to curl softly or suddenly crush—its infinite sensibility. (Virginia Woolf, The Waves)
Touching someone else’s skin is very different to hearing them, smelling them, or seeing them. (Perhaps it could be compared to making eye contact, but only to a degree.) People liken it to electricity. And it is undeniable: even when your fingertips are numb, they can still feel the tactile presence of someone else. It takes only the slightest of touches. Tobias’s is the slightest of all.
Look at how his hand is curled around the angel’s hand and wrist. It is like he’s plucking an apple. The way his middle finger is bent behind his index finger, like a pair of walking legs; the way his little finger is curled, poised, in the same way as on the angel’s right hand. There is a mixture of temptation and apprehension in his movements. And his eyes, again, are on the angel’s face: when I look at the expression in them, I can’t say that his father’s blindness, or the cure in the little box, are really what’s on his mind. He is happy to let that fish dangle unangelically out of his sight.
This particular touch appears on the cover of Roland Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (or A Lover’s Discourse). Barthes doesn’t mention the painting anywhere in the book; perhaps the cover wasn’t his decision. Still, in the fragment entitled ‘When my finger accidentally…’, he calls a squeeze of the hand ‘a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning.’2 He notices how a touch electrifies his hand; how every contact raises a question which ‘the skin is asked to reply.’ The lover speaks from a place of solitude, Barthes says. His slight touches are questions. Through the whole book, Barthes avoids referring to the lover as ‘he’ or ‘she’; at one point, he calls the use of these pronouns an ‘intolerable reduction’. In real life, however, he fell in love with other men. Reading the coyness of his ellipses and questions, his intolerance for naming his lover, I can’t help looking back at the picture on the front of his book, and of Tobias’s nervous touch, and I think of his testing gaze on the angel’s face.
—But the angel doesn’t look back. Is he unaware of what is going on?—He is an angel: I doubt it. Maybe he is looking down in the way we often do, bashfully, when we are trying not to smile. Yes, he looks adamant about walking onward, but still he isn’t pulling his hand away.—Now I am trying to see his eyes as closely as I can. Is he really looking at the little box, or has the gentle touch of Tobias’s hand caught his attention? The Biblical story would tell us that his eyes are on the cure, that he hasn’t noticed any electricity. But what do we see? A face can lie.
A few days later, I returned to the National Gallery. I had already written all of the above, but still had a sense of my experience with the painting as unfinished. It was an incredibly rainy Saturday, and as I queued on the steps to the gallery there were incredible cracks of thunder from the sky.
When I arrived at Tobias and the Angel, there were three women standing by it and speaking to each other in Spanish, but the only word I could make out was bonito. When they moved on to another room, I stepped forward and found that the painting seemed bigger than I had remembered; perhaps it was the contrast between the haziness of the artwork when I tried to picture it in my mind and the fullness of detail once it was actually before my eyes again. Only now, looking as closely as possible, did I notice that on my first viewing I had made a mistake: there are more than two people in this painting. Beneath Tobias’s cape, I can make out the crudest silhouettes of people in the distance. One of them seems to be waving. Reading the story of Tobias in the Bible again doesn’t help me understand who these people might be. I notice, all the same, that the placement of the angel’s blue cloak would block the painting’s central touch from their view.
We cannot guarantee that a new experience of an artwork will give us something more than the last experience; we cannot even guarantee that it will give us anything. Hoping that I would find something with which to compare the hands in Tobias and the Angel, I wanted to find another picture with an angel and a human touching. In the next room, I found two security guards standing beside each other, and asked them for help.
‘Excuse me—do you know if there are any other paintings like this?’ I gestured to the room with Tobias and the Angel. ‘Paintings with a person and an angel.’
‘An angel?’
‘Yes.’
‘Somewhere … somewhere here there are two angels.’ I followed this guard through two other rooms, until she stopped and pointed to a picture.
‘Here, this one. It’s very beautiful,’ she said, and I noticed her frown slightly in the direction of the painting. It was Giovanni Bellini’s The Dead Christ Supported by Two Angels, painted in the decade before Tobias and the Angel. One of the first things that struck me in it was Jesus’s left hand at the bottom of the painting, curled and rigid like a dead spider. The angular pose of his arms reminded me of the same pose, nearly five hundred years later, in a self-portrait by Egon Schiele.
Arms and hands in Schiele’s paintings always look so deliberately shaped, as if moulded around twisted wire, that I often wonder if they are trying to portray something with their gestures. (So many of Schiele's paintings are self-portraits. In a self-portrait, aren’t the hands inevitably invested with importance? The artist paints their face, their shoulders, their hair—and, eventually, their hands come into contact with themselves in pictorial form, as in the Escher drawing. Painting as a way of encountering oneself.) In Bellini’s painting, the arms—in roughly the same shape as Schiele's—look collapsed and heavy. Where there is a grimace in Schiele’s picture, in Bellini’s there is a face at rest.
The hands of Bellini’s angels are flat and unblemished; unlike in the Verrocchio picture, I feel that these hands tell me hardly anything at all. I notice how their fingers vanish into the darkness between Jesus and the fabric behind him. Perhaps these are not the hands I am supposed to look at. They hold Jesus’s arms by his sides as if to frame his torso which fills the painting, commanding our eyes. I wonder if I am supposed to read it as I would a face, or a monument.
Look back at the shape of the arms in Tobias and the Angel, and you might notice that the left arms of both characters are practically identical. When you consider that the painting is attributed to the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, and when you learn (as I learned) that this workshop would have been full of students as young as seven, then you might guess that this strange repetition—along with some of the painting’s other strangenesses, such as Tobias’s stiff posture—was drawn by an artist at the beginning of their career. Verrocchio was most celebrated as a sculptor, and it is likely that he would have supplied only a basic drawing for his students to develop into a painting like this one. Could this picture have been worked on incrementally? Left unfinished by one artist, leaning beside a table to be picked up by someone else—and thus made into a kind of conversation in paint?
The information in the National Gallery tells me that at least two aspects of the picture—the fish and the dog—might have been painted by Verrocchio’s most famous student, Leonardo da Vinci. (In fact, Giorgio Vasari claimed that Leonardo’s painting was so superior to his master’s that ‘Andrea resolved never to touch a brush again, for Leonardo had surpassed him in this craft at such a young age.’3) But what about the hands in the centre—the point which, in my eyes, the whole painting seems to emanate from, or coalesce in? If the angel’s duplicated arm was done by a less experienced painter, might Tobias’s hand, curling around it, have been added by someone else? As it appears to me, that hand is an argument against the rigid, clumsy parts of the picture.
What was meant by that touch? It remains a mystery to me. I found no answers in the gallery’s bookshop. In one book, Verrocchio’s name appears only on one page, in a passage on the young Leonardo. In connection with a criminal charge Leonardo received in his twenties, I saw this parenthetical line:
(The accusation he faced was far from unusual: the police records show that the majority of men in later fifteenth-century Florence had or were denounced for having sex with other men on at least one occasion.)4
I was tempted to let this fact validate my suspicions about Tobias and the Angel. Ultimately, however, something about the picture remains private. I noticed that one of Bellini’s angels was looking just past me, just off to my right—an effect that is even more subtle in a reproduction.
In the same way, Verrocchio’s Tobias is walking past us, off to our left: neither picture addresses its viewers directly. This Tobias is in some way a solitary walker, accompanied by a half-man, half-tangible, whose wings—if they are not to give his disguise away—must surely be less visible to Tobias than the rocks, clouds, pathways and rivers he is walking amidst. Their walk is a mission, and the small crowd in the distance is its audience—not us. What you and I are exposed to is something secret and more subtle: there is one hand, and there is another. These hands and bodies, angelic and human, are all we can lead on from. As John Berger writes:
During the Renaissance every eyelid, breast, wrist, baby’s foot, nostril, was a double celebration of fact: the fact of the miraculous structure of the human body and the fact that only through the senses of this body can we apprehend the rest of the visible, tangible world. (‘The Clarity of the Renaissance’.)
If the meaning of these hands cannot be discerned, if our suspicions and assurances will always be curtailed, we can only look one last time at the expression on Tobias’s face and ask again: what are you seeing? What huge strange thoughts are inside you?
Translated by Richard Howard.
Translated by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella.
Catherine Fletcher, The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance.
This is great. I also read the piece in The New Yorker and since then have been thinking about trying the art viewing practice they describe. I particularly like the aspect of it where they consciously avoid study/interpretation/judgement and just let the experience of encountering the artwork wash over them. I think you really captured that in the first half when you describe the painting.
The other thing this reminded me of is Wim Wenders' film "Wings of Desire," about angels in Berlin, and I went back and watched a few scenes and it's crazy how much resonance there is with your writing about hands. There are so many close ups of hands in this movie! In the library, on the subway, when Bruno Ganz and Peter Falk shake hands (one a current angel, the other a former angel). The only way I can describe it is to say that there is so much humanity expressed through hands and through touch in this movie, because that's the one thing angels can't do, they can't touch or feel, and that is ultimately what separates them from being human. Thank you for causing these reflections...
Came here from your tweet. Your article reminds me so much of that scene in The Grand Budapest Hotel, where the concierge and Zero talk about 'Boy with Apple', and part of that conversation is about the elegance with which the boy in the picture holds the apple. Lovely film, if you haven't watched. Haven't read Woolf yet, and your quote has me sold. Will check her out soon. Lovely post, Anna.