A Horse at Night by Amina Cain

Author:Amina Cain [Cain, Amina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

A portrait of Katri, in ice. I feel as though I were looking at it. Imagine finding your likeness in that way. Are you alive or are you dead? What has been captured, there in the ice?

How strange and sometimes demonic the faces of babies and children in early portrait paintings. How stern the adults. Sometimes they soften, but they rarely smile. Why do we smile now? In Italy, when I looked at paintings at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the figure with the softest expression on her face was Portia, wife of Brutus, painted by Bartolomeo della Porta (1495), and she has just helped murder Julius Caesar. I suppose della Porta wanted to portray some crucial aspect of the situation in Portia’s face. Does it relax her to think of the deed done, to think of Julius Caesar now gone? Like Wyeth’s black dog, she isn’t looking at the viewer, and points to someone, or something, we can’t see. After her husband commits suicide, she kills herself too by swallowing hot coals, pictured at the bottom of the painting. Maybe it’s the coal to which she’s pointing or looking, knowing what comes next. Regardless, she seems to be at peace.

In Portrait of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, painted by Piero del Pollaiolo (1471) to commemorate the ruler of Milan’s visit to Florence, Galeazzo’s expression is grimmer than Portia’s, even though all she is doing is visiting. She too appears to point at someone or something we can’t see, while clutching an unidentifiable object in her hand. Why are figures in paintings so often gesturing to what’s out of view? To remind us of the beyond, I suppose. Both paintings retain their mystery.

Here is another mystery, from Fleur Jaeggy’s “Portrait of an Unknown Woman” in I Am the Brother of XX: “Sometimes before a portrait something imperious and hidden, a detail, captures our attention. Does not let the gaze wander. When I abandon it, by an act of will, and resume my rounds in the halls of the museum, I am compelled to go back.” How can a detail be urgent and at the same time concealed? In fiction, what does that look like? And how do we bring the reader back to it? Perhaps it never leaves us, is part of the visual impression of what we’ve read, the narrative unfolding in pictures running parallel to its unfolding through events. An impression can be just as important as meaning.

One of the things I like about portraiture in painting and drawing and photography is that it allows for a suspension in one moment, one figure, and I think that in fiction, if readers are patient enough for it, description can get close to this too. Like watching a snowstorm from inside a house. Then you go out finally, into the snow. The action is restored. Reading The True Deceiver, I like experiencing those scenes of winter, as long as they are, staying on as winter itself does, and now that it’s been

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