Free Pictures of Fidelman by Bernard Malamud

Scarpio reads like a demon. It isn’t as complicated as you think.”
    “What about the truth of the colors?”
    “I’ll mix them for you. I’ve made a life study of Tiziano’s work.”
    Fidelman’s eyes are still unhappy.
    “What’s eating you now?”
    “It’s stealing another painter’s ideas and work.”
    The padrone wheezes. “Tiziano will forgive you. Didn’t he steal the figure of the Urbino from Giorgione? Didn’t Rubens steal the Andrian nude from Tiziano? Art steals and so does everybody. You stole
a wallet and tried to steal my lire. What’s the difference? It’s the way of the world. We’re only human.”
    “It’s a sort of desecration.”
    “Everybody desecrates. We live off the dead and they live off us. Take for instance religion.”
    “I doubt I can do it without seeing the original,” Fidelman says. “The color plates you gave me aren’t true.”
    “Neither is the original any more. You don’t think Rembrandt painted in those sfumato browns? As for painting the Venus, you’ll have to do the job here. If you copied it in the castello gallery one of those cretin guards might remember your face and next thing you know you’d be in trouble. So would we, which we wouldn’t want, naturally.”
    “I still ought to see it.”
    The padrone reluctantly consents to a one-day excursion to Isola Bella, assigning Scarpio to closely accompany the copyist.
     
    On the vaporetto to the island, Scarpio, wearing dark glasses and a light straw hat, turns to Fidelman.
    “In all confidence what do you think of Angelo?”
    “He’s all right I guess. Why?”
    “Do you think he’s handsome?”
    “Maybe he was once.”
    “You have many fine insights,” Scarpio says. He points in the distance where the long blue lake disappears amid towering Alps. “Locarno, sixty kilometers.”

    “Is that so?” With Switzerland so close freedom swells in Fidelman’s heart but he does nothing about it. Scarpio clings to him as to a virgin cousin, and sixty kilometers is a long swim with a knife in your back.
    “That’s the castello over there,” the major-domo says. “It looks like a joint.”
    The castello is pink on a high terraced hill amid tall trees in formal gardens. It is full of tourists and bad paintings. But in the last gallery, “infinite riches in a little room,” hangs the “Venus of Urbino” alone.
    What a miracle, Fidelman thinks.
    The golden brown-haired Venus, a woman of the real world, lies on her couch in serene beauty, her hand lightly touching her intimate mystery, the other holding red flowers, her nude body her truest accomplishment.
    “I’d have painted somebody in bed with her,” Scarpio says.
    “Shut up,” says Fidelman.
    Scarpio, hurt, leaves the gallery.
    Fidelman, alone with Venus, worships the painting. What magnificent tones, what extraordinary flesh that turns the body into spirit.
    While Scarpio is out talking to the guard, the copyist hastily sketches the Venus, and with a Leica Angelo has given him for the purpose, takes several new color shots.
    Afterwards he approaches the picture and kisses the lady’s hands, thighs, and breasts, but as he murmurs, “I
love you,” a guard strikes him hard on the head with both fists.
    That night as they are returning on the rapido to Milano, Scarpio falls asleep, snoring. He awakens in a hurry, tugging at his dagger, but Fidelman hasn’t moved.
     
    The copyist throws himself into his work with passion. He has swallowed lightning and hopes it will strike whatever he touches. Yet he has nagging doubts he can do the job right and fears he will never escape alive from the Hotel du Ville. He tries at once to paint the Titian directly on canvas but hurriedly scrapes it clean when he sees what a garish mess he has made. The Venus is insanely disproportionate and the maids in the background foreshortened into dwarfs. He then takes Angelo’s advice and makes several drawings on paper to master the composition before committing it