ROBERT ALTER
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living-dead leper in the anonymous canvas.
Death as a subject in turn connects Rembrandt with Bocklin, the artist
responsible for the painting ofthe death's-head that Shira keeps in her apart–
ment. Arnold BOcklin, a Swiss painter much in fashion in Central Europe to–
ward the end of the nineteenth century (Stefan George wrote a poem about
him), provides one of the teasing keys to
Shira.
Bocklin had a pronounced
preference for mythological and allegorical topics, often rendered with a
sharp realism of detail, and in pursuing this interest he repeatedly devoted
emphatic attention to those figures of classical mythology associated with a
riot of sensuality-Pan, satyrs, centaurs, Triton disporting himself with a
Nereid. He also produced two versions of an allegorical painting that is par–
ticularly pertinent to the central thematic complex of
Shira:
entitled
Poetry
and Painting,
it shows two female figures on either side of a fountain
(presumably, the Pierian Spring), Poetry on the left, naked to the waist,
leaning on the fountain's edge; Painting on the right, enveloped in drapery,
dipping one hand into the water while with the other she holds a palette. In–
terestingly, Bocklin never did a painting of a skull, if one can trust the testi–
mony of the comprehensive illustrated catalogue of his paintings published in
Berne in 1977. He was, however, much preoccupied with death, which he
characteristically represented in a histrionic mode that has a strong affinity
with Symbolist painting. One scene he painted a few times was
The Island of
Death,
in which the island looms as a spooky vertical mass against a dark
background, with a small boat approaching it in the foreground, rowed by a
presumably male figure, his back to uS,while a female figure stands erect in
the boat. One of his last paintings,
The Plague
(1989), exhibits a more
brutally direct relevance to
Shira:
a hideous female figure, with three large
wings and grotesque tail, yet more woman than monster, swoops down over
the streets of a town.
The reproduction that hangs on Shira's wall is probably of
Self-Portrait
with Death as Fiddler
(1872). It is possible that Agnon simply forgot the self–
portrait and concentrated on the skull when he introduced the painting into his
novel, but given his frequently calculating coyness as a writer, it seems more
likely that he deliberately suppressed the entire foreground of the canvas. In
the foreground, Bocklin, wearing an elegant dark smock, stands with palette
in one hand and brush in the other, his trim beard delicately modeled by a
source oflight from the upper left, his lively lucid eyes intent on the canvas
he is painting. Behind him, in the upper right quadrant of the painting, virtu–
ally leaning on the painter'S back, death as a leering skull with bony hand–
rendered in the same precise detail as the figure of the artist-scrapes away
on his fiddle. That missing artist absorbed in his work who stands in front of
the figure of death is in one respect what
Shira
is all about.
