Free Changing Heaven by Jane Urquhart Page A

the atmosphere of Arthur’s first Tintoretto at the Art Gallery of Toronto. It hangs, serene and slightly pompous, covering a full wall with static heaviness. Its very lack of movement is in direct contrast to the only other Tintoretto reproduction available in the gift shop— St. George and the Dragon
    Arthur has pinned St. George and the Dragon up on his wall. He spends hours studying it, trying to decipher its messages. In the foreground of the painting a menacing, hysterical princess is thrust towards him by something she is trying to escape from; her voluminous clothing struggling with her away from threatening weather, dark landscape, and the languid corpse of a young, nude man. She wants out, she wants to be away, and at certain moments, when Arthur has looked at the painting for too long, he fears that she wants him.
    What she appears not to want is Saint George himself-a small horseman in the background who is engaged in the act of spearing a timid, lethargic dragon. The dragon is not nearly as frightening as the emotions of the princess. Perhaps she has not even noticed Saint George, so driven is she by the demons that seem to live with her inside those yards and yards of pink silk.
    Arthur is only a student. He knows next to nothing about women. But looking at the poor, dutiful, underrated saint, and then at this huge whirlwind of a princess, he is certain that the story is all about her.
    By the age of eighteen Arthur has read Ridolfi’s strange, antiquated biography of Tintoretto no fewer than ten times, making use, at last, of the small amount of Italian his mother had coaxed into his memory when he was a child, and making use, also, of his mother to help him translate the difficult passages. It is in this small book that he learns that Tintoretto, deprived of a studio and live models, constructed miniature rooms filled with tiny wax figures. Rooms with little windows cut into them and candles placed outside them so that the artist could examine the effect of a low sun streaming into a room, or could study the dispersal of light in religious miracles. He constructed luminous, three-dimensional worlds so that he might represent them two-dimensionally on canvas. Arthur learns that the apprentice painter hung small wax angels from his studio ceiling so that he, squatting beneath, could draw the human figure floating over him. Arthur covets such an environment. Oddly enough, it is not the canals, the romance, the splendour of sixteenth-century Venice that he wants. Only the calm interior of a young man’s studio, its tranquillity – the hand-made angels turning on their threads, the flickering candles throwing golden light, the small room full of static religious subjects. The artist himself moving in an orderly, quiet, daily fashion, away from the bustle of crowded studios, towards greatness.
    When Arthur was perhaps ten years old, his mother placed a plaster-of-Paris Last Supper on a shelf above the television. There it remained, unchanging, as Arthur grew.
    Now, at eighteen, he begs it from her, takes it down to his narrow room, and places it in a cardboard box from which he has removed one side, and into the walls of which he has cut three or four windows. Arthur turns off the lights, covers the foggy window with borrowed dirty laundry, and lights a candle.
    From the ceiling, like lumpy pink fans, hang rubber dolls that Arthur has collected over the last few months from Queen Street junk shops; the cardboard wings he has made for them droop listlessly from their plump shoulders. For the moment these are ignored, as Arthur focuses his attention on positioning the candle outside the four-inch window. Then, kneeling so that his eyes are level with the small sculptural group, he contemplates the room he has created.
    Into this room streams a shaft of yellow, unearthly light. One half of the face of each disciple is illuminated, orange, except for the garish features of Judas. His head is turned towards the