The inquiry of the library

“If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.”
― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

Brooks Riley wrote so beautifully again over at 3 Quarks about her favorite obsession (except, maybe, for Wagner?): Albrecht Dürer. Like all lovers, Brooks seeks to know him. She says:  

Personality is like ether, it hovers in the atmosphere long after death. Decades, even centuries later, long after the end of memories, traces of it move through the air like a fleet aroma caught at just the right odd moment. Where did that come from? It is elusive, and cannot be captured or bottled or even explained. Such is the personality of Dürer. It rises like a mist from a certain landscape seen from the train. It lurks in the amusing portraits of friends like Stefan Paumgartner as St. George, or Willibald Pirckheimer imbibing at the baths, or the selfie pointing to the pain in his spleen. It rages in two haunting, nude sketches of himself. Or radiates in that iconic self-portrait from 1500, which hung in his atelier, never for sale but as constant reminder of the perfection he would strive for with his self-proclaimed ‘diligence', that most German of virtues—a quasi-blasphemous Christ-like pose that sanctified his art through his person. Thomas Hoving once called it ‘the single most arrogant, annoying and gorgeous portrait ever created,' missing the point—or perhaps not. It was so life-like, Dürer's dog ran over to it and started licking it before the paint was quite dry. Of the plethora of explanations for this work, I like to think he painted it in case the Apocalypse predicted for 1500 really happened. I will survive, it says. And he did.

I told her about how,

I had just finished The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th Century Bookseller’s Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece. There was so much about this book that I loved but one aspect was echoed in your wonderful post--how personality is like ether and it can outlast a human life. Much less was known about Velázquez than about Durer and the author in a very interesting manner (filtered through her own mourning over the death of her beloved father) tries to reconstruct who the Spanish painter was....there is so little to go on. She makes the point though, that in the end, we have all the evidence we need in the pictures themselves. With that in mind, looking at Durer's unbelievable self-portrait I now think the portrait of Durer in the Relic Master was too sweet. But I suppose, like you said, he didn't have a dark side and was known as an overall nice family man? And yet the self portrait!

.... And yet, how to explain Durer's extraordinary self-portrait? Salvator Mundi! 

**

I wanted to ask Brooks about Durer's library. I came across a wonderful essay by Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt in a book of essays about Las Meninas. As Laura Cumming described so painfully in her book Vanishing Velazquez, there is very little information to go on about Velazquez's personality (or his inner life). One crucial piece of evidence came to light in 1925 when scholars were able to make an inventory of his library. This was a turning point in Velazquez studies. And in knowing what books he owned, we can surmise that the painter was no intellectual slouch. For informing Las Meninas are sophisticated books on mathematics, architecture and geometry. He also had two editions of Pliny. Velazquez owned 154 volumes--which was substantial for a painter at that time. 

In Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night (a book that has become my Bible), the author describes a visit to the fateful home that Cervantes lived in in Valladolid from 1602-1605. Fateful because it was where he wrote his last work, Exemplary Novels (our hotel in Valladolid is named after one of the novellas in this work)-and where Cervantes got caught up in a murder investigation and was --yet again-- hauled off to jail. The house is a museum now and as Manguel wanders amongst what is left of Cervantes belongs, he thinks about the famous Inquiry of the Library chapter in part one of el Quixote. Deciding to try and help the mad Quixote, the barber and the priest decide to purge Don Quixote's library of any items which could have contributed to his madness. Manguel takes note of the housekeeper who insists the room itself must be purified, "for there might be here one of those many wizards who inhabit these books, and he might cast a spell on us, to punish us for wanting to expel them from the world."

Maguel notes that like many people who do not read (He doesn't say who cannot read but who do not read), the housekeeper fears the power of the books that she refuses to open.He goes on to suggest that the same superstition holds true for most readers as well; for the books we keep closest to hand are possessed by magic. 

 

Comments

[Brooks Riley]

What a wonderful blog! I’m so glad you gave me the link. It’s bookmarked now for past and future reading.
I’m not sure if Dürer had a library. He didn’t need one. His best friend Pirckheimer’s library was legendary, the best in Nuremberg and beyond. All Albrecht had to do was pop around to Pirckheimer’s place and he had access to extraordinary things. Dürer knew Latin from school, but no Greek. Pirckheimer specialized in translating from Greek to Latin, so Dürer probably read the philosophers that way. That library (or most of it) was sold to an English lord and has ended up in the British Museum. One could devote another lifetime to delving into that trove. . .
I looked at the trailer for the film of The Library at Night, and wondered, in a six-degrees-of-cultural-separation moment, if its director is the same Robert Lepage who directed the Met’s most recent Wagner Ring Cycle!
For some reason, your references to Velasquez’s library and especially that of Cervantes brought to mind one of my favorite books, The Manuscript found in Saragossa, by Jan Potocki, which I’m sure you know. Potocki, Dürer and Wagner all had one thing in common, that ‘eternal’ supply of figures, motifs, stories, and sounds gestating in their brains—a transcendent imagination that breaks away from the orderly progress of an art form and reinvents it. Potocki wasn’t quite as prolific as the other two, but that one book contains worlds.

[Leanne]

Brooks, I wrote about Chartres today at 3QD... if you get this, I have something fun to tell you!

[Brooks Riley]

Leanne,
After posting a comment to your Chartres piece, I was hit with serious flu. Now I'm back, chastened, but ready to stretch my brain again. What is this something fun you have to tell me? Something fun would be good.