Madonna and Corpse

Chapter 2 Dubois

Jacques Dubois dips a clean cloth in turpentine and drapes it across the painting, stretching and smoothing the fabric to remove all wrinkles. The white cloth — cut from an expensive linen bedsheet — is virtually transparent. Through the fine weave of fabric, as if behind a veil, a homely Virgin Mary cradles an even homelier Jesus. The baby’s head is far too small for his body, his face more like a middle-aged man’s than an infant’s, his body bizarrely muscled like a miniature weightlifter’s. Dubois smiles at the pair and murmurs, “Soon you will be so much prettier. You’ll thank me.”

In his early years, Dubois felt guilty about taking solvents or a heat gun to ancient paintings simply so that he could recycle an old canvas or wooden panel for his own works. By now, though, he knows he’s performing a service: ridding the world of mediocrities and replacing them with masterpieces. It’s as if he’s buying up dreadful shacks on spectacular lots, then knocking them down and erecting architectural gems in their stead.

After washing his hands in the paint-stained sink, he leaves the studio, crossing his backyard through clouds of blossoming plum and pear trees. In the kitchen of the old farmhouse, he assembles a simple lunch: fresh goat cheese, briny black olives, baby arugula drizzled with olive oil and lemon, a crusty baguette, and a glass — then another — of a delicate, apricot-hued rosé from a nearby vineyard. He eats slowly, savoring both the food and the latest auction catalog from Sotheby’s of London, which includes one of his works, a “Gainsborough” landscape he painted two years ago. “A previously unknown work, this is a particularly fine example of the simple style Thomas Gainsborough favored in his later period,” the catalog informs him. Once Dubois has finished with his modest portions of food, wine, and triumph, he washes, dries, and puts away the dishes before recrossing the backyard.

When Dubois bought the farm—what was it, twenty years ago? no, my God, nearly thirty! — the studio was a roofless set of walls, crammed with broken-down tractors, rusted plows, and God-knows-what-other ruined implements. The house was no prize, either, but Dubois focused solely on the barn for the first year, transforming the cavernous ruin into a bright, airy workspace.

For years now, every morning he’s brought his coffee out here, gazing across the Rhône as the rooftops of Avignon catch fire in the rising sun. The light paints the grim gray towers of the Palace of the Popes a delicate shade of pink and sets the cathedral’s towering gold statue of the Virgin blindingly ablaze. Dubois has tried to capture this magical morning alchemy of light and stone in paint on canvas, but even his prodigious skills are not up to the challenge.

Inside the studio, Dubois inspects the Madonna and the Christ-child. Their features have softened, as if the two glasses of wine are blurring Dubois’s vision. Folding back one corner of the turpentine-soaked cloth, he presses a thumbnail to the paint and feels it yield. “Perfect,” he purrs. He puts a CD into the Bose player and presses Play, and Mick Jagger laments, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” Nodding his head in time to the beat, Dubois begins to deconstruct the ancient painting.

Peeling off the veil of fabric, its fibers smeary with reds, blues, and golds from the painting, he lays it on the table and picks up a putty knife. Starting at the bottom-left corner of the panel, he scrapes upward and across in a series of short, swift strokes, taking care not to dig into the soft poplar wood beneath the paint. A moment’s carelessness, a single gouge, and the panel, for which he paid half a year’s income to a rapacious dealer in Rome, would be ruined, useless except as firewood or a tavern sign. The cost of Dubois’s raw materials — mediocre medieval paintings exhumed from attics and junk shops; blank paper and vellum, sliced from the flyleaves of ancient volumes beneath the noses of dozing librarians; boards pilfered from unguarded old chapels and fortresses — has risen a hundredfold during his career. Luckily, his own prices have increased a thousandfold, at least for showpieces like the one he’s about to create.

With each push of the putty knife, the paint glides another fraction of an inch up the blade, accumulating in thin, rippled ridges like multicolored cake frosting. Back and forth, left and right he works, pausing each time he reaches one side or the other to wipe the knife with a rag. After several hours of rhythmic strokes, he is approaching the base coat of white lead. He soaks another clean piece of linen in turpentine and lays it on the panel, then steps back to stretch. When he straightens up and arches backward, the ache in his back makes him groan. Oh, shit, I’m too old for this, he thinks, then, Good thing I’m getting out. Twisting his torso from side to side, he wrings a satisfying series of cracks from his spine and smiles slightly. Not with a whimper, but some bangs, he thinks. After a few more stretches, he removes the cloth and gently wipes off most of the white-lead primer, taking care not to rub all the way into the gesso, the underlying mixture of animal-hide glue and chalk dust used to fill the grain, smooth imperfections in the wood, and create a rigid, perfect surface on which to paint.

If he works quickly for the next few days, he’ll be finished by the time François arrives from Marseilles, bringing Dubois the final piece of the puzzle. Dubois owes François for this — owes him both money and sex — but the investment will be well worth it.