Spencer Alley: Unassigned Italian Figure Drawings at the Louvre

Thursday, September 1, 2022

Anonymous Italian Artist
Académie
ca. 1650-1700
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Figures in a Legendary Glade

When the picnic-basket lovers who had been dangling

Grapes between every kiss (thus interfusing

Leavings with their loving) left the bruised glade,

Then for three hours each weed and tendril sprang

With a tingling back to its proper bend in the sun,

Small reconciliations not to be counted.

Or not perhaps to be counted dear, being

So plural and of such a delicate vim.

Where the grapes' wet skeleton fell, swift points of light

Clustered like maggots or the remembrance of green fruit

Darklier ribbed now where no sun may ripen.

It became at last possible to watch the entire clearing.

The thick light ruminant, lit branches gently

Heaving, muscles of a beast asleep, watch it

Assimilate the lovers, what they meant

With their refreshments and their temporal soundings,

Till the flesh of the beast is burning history

Of what they endured in the glade, persisting there.

For they went, mouths plundered by the dark beast

Who with his gold twin broods on happenings:

The black beast sluggish from a thousand graces

Swallowed each day, crisper of grasses, whose

Mere odor salts the sensitive tongue with autumn.

– Greedy themselves, they had deserved no less.

Yet where they lay, light in a Maltese cross

Through branches halts them amberly from this,

Like the good gold beast for whom even now at dusk

The villagers leave meat by the black woods' edge;

Then hurry back, already too long afield,

To friends and firelit rooms and the late retelling

Of how, from the time when the world was a tall young tree,

He comes to graze, transmutes with a father's pride

The frail or bitten and, by the least of his cares,

Reddens the ashen trunk where fungus clings

Like the incidence of pleasure to his children

Committed to doom, denial, airier things.

– James Merrill (1949)