The Basilisk is in the elevator, again. It’s as if he’s moved into my apartment building and lies in wait.
“Going down?,” I say, avoiding its question with one of my own. I squeeze in alongside its disproportionate bulk.
“Down is the new up,” sighs the Basilisk.
After our last encounter (which a handful of unfortunate readers may remember had found the mythical creature ruminating on the tech-wrecked portions of our world, on the downward slopes of digital life) I’m as prepared as one can be . . . for a shot of melancholic wit from a Basilisk in a lift.
We ride down in silence. But just as I'm set to make my escape into the lobby, the Basilisk takes a chance. “Come with me,” it says, “you look like you could use a little something, and you of all people have a couple of days to spare.”
“I don’t have ‘a couple of days,’ ” I mumble self-importantly, into the air. Yet I find myself following the Basilisk outside
“We can start just across the street in the DIA!,” and with that, the Basilisk is off, its plumage catching on the hedge as we cut across the lawn.
“Hurry up,” it says. I flick a few leaves and twigs off its wings as we climb the steps and enter the museum.
◇◇◇
“NOT IN THERE again!,” the Basilisk cries, catching me gazing past Carmona's Virgin and Child, towards Cano’s St. Anthony Preaching to the Fishes. “You’re in a rut in that room. Same old . . .”
I begin to object, stand up for myself, but it’s no use. And it’s not as if the Basilisk holds itself back from looking in on a few of its favourite canvases as we proceed into the museum’s quiet and stillness.
My companion —or visitor?— is self-centred, a kind of winged Super-Ego, a warning to us all wrapped in feathers and scales. But the Basilisk isn’t boring, and I once again fail to fashion my escape. I'm falling again for its strange charisma, its bittersweet humour, the unalloyed mix of world-weariness and enthusiasm.
“You know Leonardo’s Annunciation in the Uffizi in Florence?,” the Basilisk turns to me and asks.
“No,” I say, on my back foot again, wishing immediately that I’d said “not off hand.”
“Well, I know it’s a bit famous, one of the most commonly portrayed scenes in all of Christian art” the Basilisk rumbles on, “but what if we explore what’s become so familiar?”
“There’s more going on than ‘an announcement.’ More than what the gospel of Luke tells about the angel arriving “to announce” to Mary that she would conceive a child who would be born the son of God. The Lucan prompt leaves a lot to imagine, a lot of artistic license! Imagine being visited by the archangel Gabriel and told you’ll be impregnated and give birth by miraculous means.”
“Look at da Vinci’s Gabriel, with his strong raptor’s wings. You can barely see the lily he brings!” the Basilisk opines, pulling up an image of Leonardo’s painting on his mobile and thrusting it under my nose.
“Leaning forward, kneeling in reverence? Or focussed and furtive, about to pounce?,” the Basilisk proposes. “Look at the pair’s eye contact, and just what does our envoy of God look to be communicating?”
“I have to admit I never thought of it quite that way . . ., and that’s a comely archangel,” I sputter.
“And as for our Mary,” the Basilisk presses, “she's reading on the threshold of her bed chamber at dusk, but looks both surprised and intrigued. Joseph’s off in his carpenter’s shop… I’d wager he’s up for more than distracting her from her scriptures by a bit of news. The angel itself brings the holy seed!”
I remember something like this being floated by one of the characters in The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch.1 But before I can think further, the beast thrusts other images under my nose in quick succession, talking all the while. It’s the bossy Basiliskean introduction to variations upon a familiar biblical narrative.
“Check out this fresco by Fra Angelico, who painted the annunciative moment a few times,” the Basilisk says, as if the Dominican friar’s work was its own. “The pale golds and the pinks of the angel’s gown, the work of light shadows, the calming shades of blue and green, the forest flowers.”
“Out amidst the columns of the loggia, looking on the garden with its wooden fence, its such a careful vision of space . . . But with its austerity completely interrupted by this incredible gaze shared between the celestial figure and the special human!”
“The Angel has no need to speak. The Virgin leans forward, listening, accepting.”
“Between the pair, towards the back,” the Basilisk is indicating on the screen with its claw, “there’s a door onto a kind of cell, and a small barred window to see into and almost through. Almost nothing is shown and so the eye and mind are drawn even more. Apart from the angel’s extravagant wings out front, it could be an ordinary afternoon in an extension of the fresco’s physical setting. You can just tell it was also Fra Angelico’s own conventual home. ”
“But you might prefer the moment as captured so extraordinarily by Botticelli,” says the beast scrolling through downloads on his phone. “You can feel Gabriel’s landing.”
“Seconds before, this Mary was reading peacefully at her lectern, but now, though told not to fear, she is disturbed and reaches back to defend herself.
“And then there’s Lorenzo Lotto!,” the Basilisk sings out. “A later, and differently unusual work.”
“This time, Mary shares her surprise directly with us, the viewers, turning from her reading and an intruder. And look, there’s God himself on hand, choosing Mary from above.”
“To me it’s a bit much,” I venture, as if unheard.
“But we’re prepared for the wonderful barred window,” continues the Basilisk. “And don’t miss the homely shelf, the hooks for garments, and the bed with canopy in the shadows.”
“It’s another youthful archangel,” it emphasises. “Having entered over a balcony from another beautiful garden, he’s landed right inside Mary’s bedchamber.”
“With his message and a lily, Lotto’s Gabriel makes quite a knee bend. The commotion has sent a cat scurrying away in fright. Cartoonish, you might say, after Botticelli . . . but don’t you just know that Lotto’s cat knows a little about what’s up!”
I keep walking.
I’m all ‘yes, but . . .,’ thinking up nuances and rebuttals. To start with, the possession and violence the Basilisk is sensing within these Annunciations have roots. Think only of multi-formed Zeus with any number of the female mortals. Or the abductions and rapes at the heart of the Trojan war, of Graeco-Roman mythology writ large. Think of the plot lines in the epic romance traditions that followed . . . Roberto Calasso and Madeline Miller are only two of the modern novelists who have kept exploring these paths.
And yet, there’s also the need to read the operations of metaphor in the context of when these paintings were made. How to account for Mary’s virginal conception at moments when the gradual smoothings and Christianisations of classical tropes and folk storylines were in ferment, in a process of naturalisation. But there’s no time to formulate.
The Basilisk is impatient. And it seems both to have hold of my reading list and to be able to read my mind. The only thing it enjoys more than making a sharp rejoinder is anticipating my interjections altogether.
It’s as if he’s visited me to keep me and my mind moving.
“Hush dottore” says the Basilisk, looking me in the eye, “you’ve not even spoken and already I’m drifting off.”
“You professors're like swimming coaches. Yak, yak, yak, all nice and dry, gently ageing along the side of the pool. Yak, yak, yak, but how many of you ever get wet?Your friend Harry Mulisch again, in case you skipped over that bit . . . and it’s ten times more hilarious in Dutch.”
“Mulisch played that for a laugh,” I get in, “he didn’t so roundly . . .,” but the Basilisk has me by the arm.
"Spare me dottore” says the Basilisk, “you’re your own worst enemy and you know it. Now hop to it! — we’ve got more Annunciations to ponder.”
“The basics, the symbols, the mood and movement, are present in most of these works. And if you wish, you can review how the bounty grew and grew from the medieval icons to something like, say, Dürer’s early sixteenth-century print (the Basilisk is showing off again, and his phone [also again] is in my face) .
The Basilisk then leads me into Kresge Court, where he plops down on a sofa and dispatches me for two cold pilsners (without offering to pay).
As soon as I’ve returned and the Basilisk has had a slug, it is speaking again.
“Now I want you to slow down, and do two things.”
Oh the irony of the busy Basilisk instructing me to slow down, but I listen up . . . .
“First, look closely at paintings of the theme, especially the ones you’re accustomed to dismissing or otherwise walking right past. You’ll see some old friends, like Fra Angelico, and also meet some artists we’ll see more of tomorrow in New York.
“Second, get out those drawing pencils and paints of yours, and show me how a few of these feel.”
“Tomorrow in New York?” I cry, now alongside the Basilisk who is already striding back through the galleries.
The tasks turn out to be strangely absorbing.
~~~
“Are Basilisks even allowed to fly,” I ask when we’re queued up for boarding the next morning. “I mean, in airplanes?”
“Allowed to fly?,” the Basilisk huffs, flexing its own wings, “we pre-board with active military.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to joke about these things, in airports . . .”
“‘Supposed to’ this, ‘supposed to’ that,” the Basilisk replies, stowing his carry-on, “could you be any more dreary?”
In The Met there are more Annunciations, and more variations to purported consistency, than I now expect. Even leaving the symbols behind for the figures in their settings…
The Virgin is inside and she is without. One room is sparse, and another fairly crammed with domestic objects and furniture. She shows alarm and backs away in reluctance; she appears ready and able to bear and do anything. She is an adolescent, an experienced matron; she is the Church itself.
And as for the angel Gabriel, he too is all over the map. A willowy youth, a wise and powerful force, a staid, deaconish presence stiff in vestments. The moment remains recognisably itself, again and again, but nothing about the scene-as-re-imagined stands still.
I begin to take more liberties, and only then to go back to what I was seeing (and had long been missing).
It becomes impossible to resist imagining the Annunciation, its Angel and Mary, for myself. To find the figures and scene playing out in the here and now, in the twenty-first-century present in which we find ourselves.
The Basilisk has long departed my side, off who knows where, but it’s not forgotten. Who doesn’t need such a visitor from time to time.
~~~
As I head home to Detroit, I end up thinking more and more about an etching in the DIA’s collection. The one in which Marc Chagall seems to have brought the annunciation home, the artist’s muse flying into his studio to help.
* Watercolours and photographs by Kenneth Mills.
** My thanks to Heidi Victoria Scott, who enlivened the New York portions of this adventure, put up with rather a lot of annunciation (and pointed out a Chalamet resemblance in one of my watercolour Gabes!).
Mulisch, The Discovery of Heaven, trans. Paul Vincent (New York: Penguin Books, [1992] 1996, 1997), 571.
Brilliant conception, on many levels. I foresee a series...
The practiced eye and hand, annunciating!