Metropolitan diary
Nussbaum, Mary Margaret C.
THE LAST WORD METROPOLITAN DIARY Mary Margaret C. Nussbaum I've seen Caravaggio's The Incredulity of Thomas only in reproduction. Three apostles have come to the resurrected Christ. Their four...
...Of course, I know about the Met, the way one knows about Algiers or Proust or Big Ben...
...The viewer enters the scene just slightly above the tabletop, as though seated where the painter has, moments before, hastily left...
...I hurried through the galleries of sarcophagi and burnished codpieces, not yet ready for them, needing something more familiar, accessible...
...The ham, the trophy, is succulent with its ribbons of pink fat and delicate veins...
...Is his servant- so recently vanished-plotting to poison him...
...New York City...
...Christ's bare chest is in light, but his head is in shadows...
...Like Thomas, I am stubborn and clever...
...Mary Margaret C. Nussbaum presently lives and teaches high school in New York City...
...The prospect of visiting the Met is as exotic as, well, visiting Potsdam...
...I look at the Caravaggio, just a postcard on my desk...
...He must paint quickly to catch the light...
...As I make my way downtown by subway, the other paintings that I am not quite ready to see come to mind...
...The trail, only lightly trampled, an invitation to the green that surrounds it...
...The locals call it "the Met...
...My eye moves to the oak and the path before it...
...Or is the drama in the objects themselves-the jug, the goblet, the water...
...For whom were the three stacked plates and why does Rousseau eat alone...
...The cloth is creased, the day's newspaper is folded neatly, and an unopened letter to Monsieur Ph...
...Does he groan in pain...
...The two are close enough to feel one another's breath, and Christ's mouth is slightly open...
...I was twenty-three when I made my first visit to the Met...
...Keeping custody of my eyes, I walk past store windows filled with Italian shoes and gossamer blouses, bagels, and cell phones...
...For now, these paintings and prints will have to serve as my witnesses-like the disciples in the darkened upper room...
...There is a story here...
...Behind, the room is dark...
...Rousseau awaits its reader...
...I imagine Monet, standing on the other side of the path with his brush, hesitant...
...The tree looks charred, yet it blooms...
...Here is Claude Monet's Bodmer Oak, Fontainebleau Forest: his 38 by 51 in...
...And now Philippe Rousseau's Still Life with Ham-a dinner table just abandoned...
...I want evidence...
...Their four bowed heads come together like the arms of a cross, or the petals of a wilted flower...
...My destination: the Metropolitan Museum of Art...
...I fear I don't have the depth to sit in front of Mark Rothko's color fields, or the levity to fly with Marc Chagall's lovers in The Birthday...
...Thomas was absent Easter evening, the story goes, when Christ returned through locked doors to end his followers' unbelief...
...I am home now, behind my own locked door...
...It is an animated world, with trees like men, the bright fingertips of their thin arms stretching out into a sky that looks as thick as denim...
...On a Saturday morning, I take the 6 train to 86th Street and walk up into a world busy and swept dean, New York's Upper East Side...
...Is he late...
...Not to mention Caravaggio's Thomas, hanging in Germany, safely out of range for now...
...Each crease in Thomas's forehead is brightly lit with the strain of concentration...
...Thomas has put his finger into the wound in Christ's side...
...Wanting to understand, I try to smell the sweat, feel the heat in the room where Jesus has come in search of his doubting disciple...
...Well fed and in wonder, I push away from Rousseau's table, Monet's woods, this gallery, and head back into the streets...
...Their minute replications, on postcards, in textbooks, have been shaking me up all my life...
...Amedeo Modigliani's nudes-black-lined and round-overwhelm me...
...I will return another Saturday to take in more paintings...
...Jesus' hand grips Thomas's wrist, holding him, allowing him...
...I grew up in Colorado and went to college in Indiana...
...There is contained violence in the scene-one corner of the tablecloth, hastily upturned, and the knife resting against the ham hock, ready to cut again...
...It is already gone...
...The painting is all chiaroscuro...
...I wonder if I'll ever know-the original is in Potsdam...
...And, like Monet, trying to catch the day's fleeting light on his canvas, I'll spend a lifetime trying to understand how that light falls on a face-on us all...
...scene is dark at midday, the sunlight interrupted by a canopy of leaves...
...now I stand before the originals, trying to be still...
...Is he gasping...
...I have seen its name on countless postcards, postcards I have taped above my bathroom mirror or keep tucked in books...
...He squints his eyes and sees- suddenly-birds of light in the trees, pools of light on the ground...
...But I've only recently arrived in Manhattan...
...I need to see the wounds...
...The apostles' eyes are drawn to a single, saving wound...
...I climbed the grand staircase to the nineteenth-century European paintings...
Vol. 129 • December 2002 • No. 22
