The Painted Room, page 1
ALSO BY INGER CHRISTENSEN
alphabet
Azorno
Butterfly Valley
The Condition of Secrecy
it
Light, Grass, and Letter in April
Natalja's Stories
INGER CHRISTENSEN
THE PAINTED ROOM
A tale of Mantua
TRANSLATED FROM THE DANISH
BY DENISE NEWMAN
A New Directions Paperbook Original
Copyright © 1976 by Inger Christensen & Brøndums Forlag
Copyright © 2000, 2025 by Denise Newman
Published by arrangement with Gyldendal Group Agency
All rights reserved.
Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, or be used to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies or develop machine-learning language models, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
First published as New Directions Paperbook 1633 in 2025
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025006303
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin by New Directions Publishing Corporation 80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
Contents
I. The Diaries of Marsilio Andreasi: a selection
II. The Peacocks’ Secret
III. My Summer Holiday by Bernardino, 10 years old
I
THE DIARIES OF MARSILIO ANDREASI
a selection
1454
14th March
Now, in this hour, begins the systematic destruction of my beloved Nicolosia.
Now she is placed on the pine bench of wedlock and is stretched and bent until she has pushed out an adequate number of sons. I cannot understand it.
I cannot understand how those kinds of arrangements are thought to be necessary in a time when it is so openly the fashion to get quantities of illegitimate children, not only to brag about their mere existence, but also and essentially to wager on those products that achieve a reasonable quality. Which is honest enough. At certain junctures, it is even an idealistic and sensible thing.
Therefore I cannot understand the morbid logic that in these circumstances demands the sequestration of a woman as one of its sick consequences, nor the need to isolate her in a kind of philosophical forcing house where birth, death, and violence are blended according to the simplest domestic recipe ever handed down. The resultant dish is called life-enhancing, mystical, healthy. Poor Nicolosia! If we venture into this field at all we become fathers in any event.
In my despair I have even invoked the Heavenly Father, the World’s Actuary, hoping that in His wisdom He would enter up the reckoning for my beloved in such a way that she would be unable to produce issue—sons or otherwise—in her forced marriage.
But deep in my heart I am in doubt: Why should He (as the only one) stretch out his hand to me, a simple secretary, in his lofty insouciance? He is not to know that this secretary is a writer in his free time and, as such, an actual protégé of heaven.
He is not to know because I never reveal myself.
He cannot even know I have my reasons for it, that I cast a jaundiced eye upon the present conditions, with every other secretary at least and soon every fifth doctor and lawyer, not to mention any number of carpenters and other down-to-earth people, cavorting about our squares and piazzas and fanning each other on the nose with their latest poems.
My attitude about this whole wretched business has long been that it is too late to speak up when God and everyone else just talks and talks and nobody listens anymore.
If only we had married the first time we saw each other.
19th April
Spring is awful. The Mincio flows in over the island as if over a plate, leaving behind its rats, its mud, and its gasping fish. This is the type of reward nature gives its loyal cultivators.
Baldassare came in from the villa crying yesterday. The rain had torn the blossoms off the treetops and there will be a dearth of almonds and olives. What should a gardener do on the waves of sin? he screamed.
Yes, what should a fisherman do in the desert? Or a stonemason in heaven? Or the angel in the fire of earthly feelings? What should he do?
19th April. Evening
It is best to no longer call yourself a human being. But in the silence of your heart to talk to yourself as if to a sphinx, a machine, or a monk.
20th April
Sat in the Hall of the Sun today listening to Bartholomeo.
Both Gianfrancesco and Rodolfo were present. As always when there are catastrophes in the air they were in a cheerful mood. If only it were they and not their father who had charge of the castle’s affairs, many things would look differently. First and foremost, my accounts.
We were drinking wine from the Kuri’s fields on the Capitol, vintage 1444. It had gone off.
“Dear Bartholomeo Manfredi, tell us about mankind,” sneered Rodolfo.
“Yes, tell us about crop failure and the lists of sins,” said Gianfrancesco as he poured the wine. “About ruins and disappointed hopes.”
He is like his mother. A true Hohenzollern. Practical and morose.
I sat thinking about the ruins on the Capitol. About how only fifteen years ago the entire complex had been overgrown with hawthorn and acanthus and how the Pope had sent his vintner monks up there with instructions not to return before they were able to bring him back a jar of the Capitol’s wine.
“When something is necessary why do we not do it?” said Rodolfo.
They were now speaking about the floods which would occur in 1455 and 1456 and 1457, continuing in this way every spring into eternity.
“It is because chance enters into it,” said Bartholomeo.
“That is no excuse,” they said with one voice and laughed, as if that put them in agreement about everything.
“No, it is no excuse,” said Bartholomeo. “Not at all. Everything is preconditioned by the game of chance. But people forget that rationality is only one system among many others. They forget that the world is moving on. They believe it stands still while they sit down and ponder.”
“What does Bartholomeo Manfredi mean by the world?” said Rodolfo obsequiously.
“As a mathematician I am concerned only with mapping out the logical entities and the way they move,” he said coldly, “so they will no longer get in the way of intuition.”
“Intuition! I’ll drink to that!” said Gianfrancesco.
Vintage 1444 is one of the very first from the Capitol. To begin with, the wine gives one a lift, but afterwards its vengeance is dire.
After this we began to talk about the past, about all the visionary projects that never came to anything because while the war would have justified their being carried into effect, it never broke out at precisely the right place and time to require the project to be realized.
And Rodolfo told the same old story about the tyrant from Milan and his partiality for the colossal.
How, for the price of 300,000 gold guilders, he carried out the most fantastic dam projects that would have enabled him to divert the Mincio from Mantua and the Brenta from Padua at will and, in a matter of a few hours, put these cities at his mercy. But all his great engineering works remained unfinished.
“If only they existed,” said Gianfrancesco, “then Mantua would be spared this eternal flooding.”
“Then Mantua would not exist. Then the tyrant would have long ago annihilated the future which we are now living in,” said Bartholomeo. “As soon as a so-called tyrant comes into possession of an instrument of destruction you can be sure it will be used.”
“Desperate ills need desperate remedies,” said Rodolfo, foolish as he is.
And that is where it was left. The floods should be banished by drought and the drought by flooding, war by peace, and peace again by disputes and riots and popular insurrections.
21st April
When I look at what I have written from our conversation yesterday, I really feel that we are grappling with matters far above our station.
Also the wine, which we drank again today, makes me feel ashamed. I was actually present at the time when Lodovico was delivered the jars by the papal carriage and in his bombastic excitement vowed that they should be reserved for his wake.
True, he could not know and does not know the wine is sour.
But neither could Gianfrancesco and Rodolfo know if one day a miracle, maybe at the moment of death, were to turn the wine from the Capitol into pure nectar.
Tomorrow I will check on the jars and balance the accounts.
12th May
Federico has come home from Venice bringing the first report of Nicolosia Bellini’s marriage to Andrea Mantegna.
(undated)
Oh my God and Creator, make me deformed so that my heart and mind will be visible to your eye.
1457
27th November
Today I could no longer keep silent.
During the last year Lodovico has requested me to draw up no fewer than ten so-called letters or petitions to this Mantegna.
I cannot describe what sorrow this has woken in my mind, having to attend to these shrieking letters.
To see such a magnanimous and lovable person as the Prince of Gonzaga humiliating himself to such a degree for a simple and stubborn painter has been one
of the greatest trials during my employment here in Mantua.
Why do we not appoint Storlato to the position of court painter? He is a sociable man and has painted both God the Father and the Twelve Apostles many times.
Or Il Pannonio? Why do we not send for him? He has the necessary delicacy. But of course no one would expect that from someone who has grown up in Hungary.
Might it be better to have grown up in Squarcione’s workshop, where the only muses are impudence, deceit, and profit?
Many times I have heard Squarcione give the young apprentices orders to sneak into other workshops around the city and steal their good ideas or copy their latest creations.
This is how both Pizzolo and Mantegna were taught arrogance, brutality, and the hunt for novelty.
This I also said to Gonzaga. Why appoint a troublemaker? I said. Just look what happened to Pizzolo. He was murdered. So why appoint the murderer’s closest friend so long as the murderer remains at large?
But Gonzaga has taken no account of my suggestions. He simply persists with his idolatry and furthermore has applied to the Protonotary Apostolic Gregorio Correr, as well as to prominent public officials in Padua, in letters that almost amount to bribery, asking them to use their influence on the divine decorator. As if these high-ranking officials were temple servants in some interior-design workshop.
Within the past few months the Gonzaga family’s offer to Mantegna has increased fivefold. Amounts that have little to do with reality.
The good Fancelli will have something to say about this. He has not received his salary since the spring, despite the fact that in August he was ordered to travel to Padua at the height of the plague, with all manner of threats if he did not save the great artist from dying like a fly and remove him to safety behind the walls of Mantua as soon as possible.
Why risk Luca Fancelli’s life in order to save Mantegna’s? Is an architect suddenly worth less than a painter? After all, the walls have to be designed and erected before they can be painted on.
Moreover, what did Fancelli find when he reached the painter’s house? He found a man who had pawned his wife’s ring in order to be able to survive and remain self-sufficient. He found a man who refused to open his door to a worthy delegate from Mantua’s court; a man who had sealed up his house with plaster and terra-cotta and who shouted so loudly through the sealed door Fancelli got plaster in his eyes. “I am not dealing with infected architects,” he shouted. “Let the whole benighted city fall to ruin. I take my stand on the light in my pictures.” Poor Nicolosia!
Yes, it really looks as if Lodovico will go down in history as a mild and thoughtful prince with a propensity for bizarre ideas and artistic abominations.
As for me, for the time being I am excused from composing letters and nothing apart from the daily accounts prevents me from completing my treatise “On the Relationship Between Intuition and the Art of Calculation.”
In connection with this, I finally started counting the jars of the Capitol wine. There were 250 half-gallon jars. Thus, exactly half of the original gift of one thousand quarts of wine. So Lodovico should not have too many illusions about an unforgettable wake.
1460
3rd August
Mantegna arrived at a quarter to two, visibly plagued by the heat and by his three dogs, each of them practically man-high; they were half-wild with thirst and licking the salty sweat off his hands and throat.
He was alone. He had left his family and the rest of the company behind with a wine grower northeast of Villafranca so they could rest for a day and organize their people and their possessions: the evening before, they had been out in a violent cloudburst in the already waterlogged terrain west of Zevio.
I hate him.
As a rule these artists reveal themselves to be conservative upstarts in their actual behavior. They take pride in defying the elements to no useful purpose.
Mantegna was no exception as he stood there in the courtyard almost completely encrusted in mud and unable to say a word because of the filth and exhaustion.
If you had not seen him move you might have thought that the entire Mantuan court had been ordered to salute one of the effigies brought to light in the excavations at Clusium, in some novel act of devotion.
Everyone was called out and the place was swarming with children and women and livestock. It is amazing how many creatures we are hiding in our houses.
But it was not until Bartholomeo Manfredi was summoned from his tower and introduced as the learned mechanic that I became truly disgusted: Lodovico really has no sense of proportion.
It is all too much when we have a God-given mathematician and he is put in the shade simply because a picture maker happens along who has shown a little sensitivity and taste.
If the State, with its thinkers and seers, were to be cast down in the dust on account of its sensuality and its selfish dreams, then I should rather see Baldassare the gardener lead Mantua back to its condition of original innocence.
Fancelli was beside himself; he gave a sickening display of superstition in its latest form—he brought in two bowls with honey and garlic, and when Mantegna was suddenly racked with a shiver which could probably be interpreted as nausea, Fancelli threw himself to the ground and kissed the man’s boots, for no apparent reason. But among those who knew what was what, here was a sign that from now on he would place this ague-ridden painter on the same level as his lord and master, Leon Battista Alberti, who for many years has been authorized to call himself a genius.
A genius so all-embracing that along with everything in the world that he has mastered there are only two small, innocent things that he has not: honey and garlic. At the sight of them Mantegna promptly throws up, gets a fever, and has to sleep for days. Like a jilted mistress.
To do him justice I have to say that Mantegna took scarcely any notice of this display of emotion; at dinner he ate both a beefsteak studded with garlic and focaccia with honey.
17th August
Today I finally caught a glimpse of Nicolosia. I became deathly pale and could barely move. My brain turned completely white and my heart was so drained of blood that it could hardly beat; and I froze. An angel in the fire of earthly feelings.
1464
23rd September
Mantegna returned this evening from his trip to Lake Garda and my time in heaven is over.
In less than five months we have lived a whole life. She like a flower among flowers. I like a bee among bees. In the garden of paradise.
All happiness is now collected and deposited in death as the fire is in the sun.
24th September
Nothing can affect the melting sphinx.
5th October
For days and nights there have been parties and discussions, sad and witty, conceited and beautiful, in a sort of blending that has never before been the fashion.
Feliciano is really a delightful person.
Evening after evening he has been chuckling as he listens to Antenorea’s sober accounts of the expedition, and with his laughter he sheds light on its obscurer passages, while all along, without it in any way becoming apparent to us, he has been composing the most wonderful songs in his ingenious head, songs about nature and the rebirth of humanity.
Tonight, after Antenorea had told about their last solemn outing on Lake Garda under sail, he sang about the snow on the highest mountain that melts so slowly, as if constantly holding back its tears, as if it was in league with the sun and was more fire than water.
“This is the way we should live,” said Mantegna, who, apart from this, did not contribute much to the conversation. He still wore the wreath of flowers with which Feliciano had adorned him a few months ago, that day in May when they arrived at the southern shore of the lake and had immediately taken the newest branches from the trees to build a temple where they pretended to be shepherd animals—as Feliciano described them—and set to worshipping the holy Virgin and her Son, the shining Thunder God, while rain poured down from a cloudless sky.
That wreath, however, is the only visible result that the expedition returned with. Unless you include the aura of devotion which has reigned over Mantegna since their return, as though he is watching a secret of which he knows nothing and which will escape his mortal frame forever if he is subjected to the slightest agitation.
