"Baker, Kage - Standing in His Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baker Kage)

Had they known of their demotion, the old gentlemen of Amsterdam and Utrecht might not have felt too badly; for by the twenty-fourth century, the whole of Medieval art had been condemned for its religious content, as had the works of the masters of the Italian Renaissance. The French Impressionists were considered incoherent and sleazy, the Spanish morbid, the Germans degenerate, and the Americans frivolous. Almost nothing from the twentieth or twenty-first centuries was acceptable. Primitive art was grudgingly accepted as politically correct, as long as it didn't deal in objectionable subjects like sex, religion, war, or animal abuse, but the sad fact was that it generally did, so there wasn't a lot of it on view.

But who could find fault with the paintings of Jan Vermeer?

It was true he'd done a couple of religious paintings in his youth, before his style had become established, and the subject matter of his Procuress was forbidden, but it too was atypical of the larger body of his work. And his Diana and her Companions was enthusiastically accepted by the Ephesian Church as proof that Vermeer had been a secret initiate of the Goddess, and since the Ephesians were about the only faith left with political power or indeed much of a following, the painting was allowed to remain in catalogs.

There was, of course, the glaring problem of the Servant Pouring Milk. But, since Vermeer's original canvases hadn't been seen in years due to their advanced state of deterioration, it was no more than the work of a few keystrokes to delete the mousetrap from the painting's background and, more important, alter the stream of proscribed dairy product so it was no longer white, in order that the painting might henceforth be referred to as Girl Pouring Water. This would avoid any reference to the vicious exploitation of cows.

Those objections having been put aside, Vermeer was universally loved.

He glorified science—look at his Astronomer and Surveyor! He was obviously in favor of feminism, or why would he have depicted so many quiet, dignified women engaged in reading and writing letters? There were, to be sure, a couple of paintings of women drinking with cavaliers, but everyone was decorously clad and upright, and anyway the titles had been changed to things like Girl with Glass of Apple Juice or Couple Drinking Lemonade. He valued humble domestic virtues, it was clear, but refrained from cluttering up his paintings with children, as his contemporary de Hoogh had done. All in all his morality, as perceived by his post-postmodern admirers, suited the twenty-fourth century perfectly.

They liked the fact that his paintings looked real, too. The near-photographic treatment of a subject was now considered the ultimate in good taste. An orange should look like an orange! The eventual backlash against Modern Art had been so extreme as to relegate Picasso and Pollock to museum basements. Maxfield Parrish and the brothers Hildebrandt might have been popular, had they not unfortunately specialized in fantasy (read demonic) themes, and David painted too many naked dead people. So, with the exception of a few landscape painters and the flower paintings of DeLongpre, Vermeer was pretty much the undisputed ruler of popular art.

Having been dead nearly seven centuries, however, it is unlikely he cared.




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THE ROOM UPSTAIRS, 1661

The camera obscura had worked, after a fashion. The image hadn't been especially bright, muzzily like a stained-glass window out of focus, but Jan had been able to sharpen it up by sealing all the gaps in the cabinet with pieces of black felt. All he had to do then was set up the picture: so he tried a variation on a popular piece by Maes, The Lazy Maid.

Catharina obligingly posed at the table, pretending to sleep. Above her, Jan hung the old painting of Cupid from the stock his father had been unable to sell. Beside her was the view through to the room where the dog posed with simpleton Willem, both of them apparently fascinated by circling flies. Jan had laid their one Turkey carpet on the table, and carefully set out the symbolic objects that would give the painting its disguised meaning, to be deciphered by the viewer: the jug and wineglass to imply drunkenness, the bowl of fruit to suggest the sin of Eve, the egg to symbolize lust.

"Why don't these things ever have anything good to say about ladies?" Catharina complained.

"Damned if I know," Jan told her, adjusting her right arm so she was resting her head on her hand. "But it's what the customers want. Hold it like that, see? That symbolizes sloth."

"Oh, yes, I know all about sloth," she retorted, without opening her eyes. "I'm a real woman of leisure, aren't I?"

"Mama, the baby's awake," little Maria informed them cautiously, edging into the room.

"See if you can rock her back to sleep, then."

"But she's really awake," Maria insisted, wringing her hands.

"Then give her a toy or something! Just don't let her cry."

"All right." Maria left the room. Catharina opened one eye and glared at Jan.

"If she starts crying, I'll run like a fountain, and that'll ruin this gown, and it's my best one! Unless you can get me a pair of sponges in a hurry," she said.

"I'll be as fast as I can." Jan retreated into the black cabinet with his palette.

Working quickly, despite the panicky realization that he'd installed the cabinet too far away from the light of the window, he roughed out everything he could see in a few wide swipes of the brush, applying the pale paint thinly. The main thing here was to get the perspective nailed down. Afterward there would be plenty of time to lavish on color and detail …