By Night Under the Stone Bridge by Leo Perutz

Author:Leo Perutz [Perutz, Leo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction, General, strange, Supernatural, Religion, Religion & Spirituality, Fantastique, Historical Fiction
ISBN: 9781559700559
Publisher: Arcade Pub.

THE PAINTER BRABANZIO

Prague was the home of a painter of whom little is known to posterity. His name was Vojtech or Adalbert Brabanec, but he was by no means averse to being addressed as Signor Brabanzio. He could certainly have been called a rogue and vagabond rather than a painter. Every year he used to go on his wanderings through Bohemia, Austria, Hungary and Lombardy, but he never accepted work with a recognised master and never stayed anywhere for long, for he had his own views about the art of painting and would not adapt himself to a master’s instructions. He was of a restless disposition in other ways too, for wherever he went he made rebellious speeches against authority and showed his contempt for respectable and responsible people, and even for those who were merely decently dressed. So he spent his time in peasants’ beer houses, harbour taverns and houses of disrepute, where his rebellious speeches were enjoyed and his ability to draw likenesses of his boon companions with a few strokes was appreciated. Even when he was not drunk, and even on Sundays, he looked like someone who had just been picked up out of the gutter, and his face bore traces of affrays and brawls in which he had been involved, for when trouble broke out he and his companions were always ready with their knives.

When he had had enough of brawling and wandering for the time being, he would come back to Prague, shirtless, in tattered shoes, without a kreuzer in his pocket, and sometimes actually without the tools of his trade, and he would stay with his brother, who was a jobbing tailor and lived on the bank of the Moldau not far from the convent of St Agnes. The two brothers got on badly, though they were fond of each other. The tailor deplored the fact that he did not paint respectable people, or madonnas and saints, but only common people and shady characters: drunken soldiers, gipsies, dog catchers, pickpockets, the washerwomen on the banks of the Moldau with their baskets, quacks, tooth extractors, all sorts of characters from the streets of the ghetto, and the women who sold their homemade plum cakes on the Kleine Ringplatz. He also took amiss his brother’s failure to be sensibly economical with the money he occasionally earned with his daubs, for, as the saying is, a fool and his groschen are soon parted.

Now, some of his little pictures, hasty sketches and drafts, came into the hands of persons who knew, or claimed to know, something about art; and one of his products, showing a bearded, rather awkwardly built Capuchin friar rapturously contemplating a cheese that had been either stolen or scrounged, had been seen by the Emperor.

At the time Rudolfll was passionately devoting himself to the enrichment of his picture gallery and his collection of rareties, and he scraped together the money to pay for these things from wherever he could, with the result that the treasury had a great deal of difficulty in paying his debts.

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