Titian, fashion, fathers

David Toms

We are as concerned to under-stand the eye we were given as the one we acquired, which is often so well kept for us by others that redundancy is a continuing risk. Thrust back, then, upon intimacies seldom deserving extended develop-ment, we're better off to be brief. Why was it, David, that my father's favourite painting was this one; why was it that he told me so; why was it that he did so, fearlessly? These are not your concerns; for-
give me the impression that you need no introduction to this canvas. If we are to speak of it, what can we say?

We would rather not be fatuous about Titian, if only not to drive down the value of the esteem we enjoy wearing about our neck. Yet we'd rather not focus on his genius for fashion, either, sensing the immodesty of some of its costs. The sapphire on this chain would educate a perfectly respectable neurosurgeon, and we all know their worth these days. What would the pearl bring, rash as it might be to sub-divide the legacy? By the way, have you seen a finer blue against a black, yet still enthrallingly a stone?

We enjoy evening dress - which this is not - but the detailing of a shirt for such occasions has more than once returned to this well. If you were adoles-cent, as my father was when he first saw this painting, you may be at school with your horses, and you may be more interested in the gloves. What do you see if you're a boy, the flagrant splendour of the luscious textures, or the bold orthogonal of the wrist? What are you to make of the ease of this grasp, these luxuriant hides, these flashing high-lights, beyond their signature of sensuous comfort?

We've learned the rhet-oric of gesture in that self-conscious time, and the security of signets. But this is when we study skeletal scale with imag-inative, interpretive in-terest, and vasculature with new familiarity. There's power, and yet it reads like praise. Whose?

A very great deal of black in this painting would make it difficult to extract the figure from the field, but for line and light. We are forced, are we not, David, to greet his emergence at the neck, by the stroke of adopting the rota-tion of his collar as our lever, laid easy across the bone. For the third time, the delicate, and by now plainly treasur-ing cloth is his entrance, not merely his frame. We are 14 years old in the Palais du Louvre and have just discovered some-thing we can not forget: the figure's greater than the frame. Now the coincid-ing of the cleft in his chin with the line of his cloak divests itself of coincidence. He is drawn out.

Surely, you remember, David, how taxed you've been to make a study of a more famous smile, on this same afternoon. How notably bright, the corner of this mouth is, as if made damp. But easy, once again, generously amiable, dis-creet, alert. The eyes said that, but not this.

You see the clasp now, David. You've appreciated the casualness of the mode, but now you know this detail is not accidentally supplied. But your mother has chalices like this, all about the house. And they are full of flowers, aren't they? You're a boy of 14, and he is not a chorister.


The father is notoriously written about, from Ackerley to Nicolson, to Waugh and way beyond; and one thing I am not going to submit mine to, is the demand to tell me things he does not mean to say. He never did that to me - after infancy, that is. But there is nothing little, nothing idle in a man's remembering for 30 years, one painting he can call his favourite; no concession more generous to curiosity; no confidence more estimable to a boy.

He left me with all the choice a man could want, and I still can't be sure mine isn't his. I can't see a shirt well cuffed without thinking of what he taught me about frames. I can't see hands and soft leather against a field of black without recalling Titian; 
I can't evaluate a white shirt worn casually without seeing what it holds.

When people come to you, David, to denounce beauty as gratuitous, do you ask them what they can accept in a man? Would you give it to them?


I didn't think so.














Titian
Man with a glove
Venice, ca 1520