Parisian triptyque
Three short pieces lifted from myself + a new fragment
A triptyque or triptych is a piece of art, not uncommon in the Middle Ages, made of three separate panels, the two outermost of which are hinged to open and close, to hide or reveal the central piece. Since triptychs actually do often stay closed, the outside of the two side panels were equally decorated, to create their own figural composition.
Here, I want to offer you three short pieces taken from my Instagram account, prompted by my latest travel to Paris (all photos are, as usual, my own). I hope you will indulge me and my rose-tinted glasses. At the end, a new fragment that came about, in part, because I was thinking of the triptych structure. Or maybe I was thinking in a triptych structure because of what I discuss in it. Consider it this dispatch’s triptych closed/closure image.
Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante.
You know, sometimes life is funny. One day you’re an undergrad being swept by Marc Bloch’s The Historian’s Craft (L’Apologie pour l’histoire), then almost twenty years later meet part of his family because a friend from São Paulo who you met in Paris now lives in Rio and is organizing an event with them.
Then the stars align and you just so happen to be in Paris a few days after Bloch entered the Panthéon, and you get to watch Xavier Gallais present a dramatic reading of his Strange Defeat (L’Étrange défaite) in front of a captivated audience in an otherwise empty Panthéon after hours in a stunning and sunny summer evening.
In almost every bookstore I entered, there he was. The Royal Touch (Les Rois thaumaturges) and Feudal Society (La Société féodale) staring at me, reminding me of a past life when I met the hard-and-dry historian. Next to them, often but not always, The Historian’s Craft, beckoning me back to past worlds and lives.
In between, the sweltering heat and the blinding blue to Parisian summer. The connecting dot between all the disparate persons I have been as an adult. The place where I get to be someone in between, all of them and none of them.
The place where I get to be like the ogre of the fairy tale, following Bloch’s description-advice: “where [she] senses human flesh, [she] knows there is [her] prey.”
Les toits de Paris
The first time I noticed how physical the skies in Paris could be was in the fall of 2011, when I moved to the city for my MA. I remember walking to the Jardin du Luxembourg one morning with my mom, looking up to see some flower pots on a windowsill, and realizing how unbelievably there the sky was.
Over the following years, I would come to know two different, but equally inescapable, configurations of Parisian skies that impressed upon me a haptic quality I have yet to experience elsewhere. The first, common in the colder months of the year, is a light gray that lingers just above the cityscape, not warm sepia but cold silver bearing down like a heavy mass, inescapable. It stands still, daring you to move through it, and you’ll want to (like sipping the unctuous but ultimately barely there foam of a latte) until it disappears behind the shades of nighttime.
The other, my favorite, common in the warmer days, is a solid blue that blinds not just your eyes but your mouth and your skin. I swear you can taste it as much as feel it. It’s light satin in the earlier hours of the morning, growing into cotton and then velvet right before sundown. It’s the feeling you get when you hold an ice cube for too long in your mouth when it’s too hot outside. It calls to you, it resonates inside you, asking whether you have it in you to ignore it. You don’t. You vibrate together with it as it brings out sweat but also the joy of being there.
Paris is full of things to see, but so much of it you miss if you just don’t look around. Or up.
Calcaire lutétien
Everyone knows cities have smells and sounds. Some even agree that cities have flavors. If we’re talking about Paris, I have to add that it also has a specific texture. It is ever so slightly grainy, not bumpy but sand-like. It is the texture of limestone, more specifically of Lutetian limestone, historically quarried in and around the city.
They carved up Paris to build up Paris. Quite literally.
Blocks of limestone were used to make both the Haussmannian buildings with their metal railings and medieval churches. They make up the Notre-Dame and the Louvre, but also many of the pieces inside these buildings and others. It was carved into angels, Virgins, as well as gargoyles.
And so I’ve come to judge all other textures by its standards. Antoni Canova’s marbles become cold and soft, Rodin’s bronzes turn warm and unyielding and his plasters too brittle. Tapestries are too fragile. Parchment is crinkly and pliable, while metalwork is sharp. All of it alluring, none of it as inviting as the soft beige that teases you into running your hands against it and feeling its fine grit. Or seeing it on your skin.
Texture is, afterall, also light playing against a surface, playing against our memories and imagination.
Un vrai triptyque
And, as closure: I was lucky to be in Paris and to visit the Louvre while the Triptyque de Moulins or the Triptyque de la Vierge Glorieuse was in view in the museum following its three-year restoration campaign. In full honesty, I am not a huge fan of Flemish and early Netherlandish paintings, as I find the figures to be in general too stiff and distant to my liking. But I am a huge fan of stumbling upon art, which is how I saw the Triptyque in question (I also happened to be in Paris for two major temporary exhibitions—Michel-Ange, Rodin: Corps vivants in the Louvre, and Leonora Carrington in the Musée du Luxembourg—, but visiting them was planned for).
Triptychs come in various sizes. My most intimate experience with them happened through the variety carved in ivory in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in France, usually small enough to fit in your hand. The Moulins specimen is a veritable beast in comparison: it is over 150cm tall and almost 300cm wide when fully opened, depicting an enthroned Virgin with the Child, her body covered in velvety deep blue and bright red, his fully naked, surrounded by an angelic court and being prayed to by Pierre II, duke of Bourbon, to the left, and his wife Anne of France, to the right (a very common composition for this type of piece).
The display in the Louvre allows the visitor also to see the reverse side of both lateral panels, which would be the properly visible part when the shutters were closed. This other composition, in contrast to the richly (almost heavily) colored scene viewed when the triptych is open, was rendered in grisaille, and shows a modest Virgin (surrounded nonetheless by ornate Gothic arches) receiving the Annunciation from Gabriel. The figures are still a little too elongated and stoic for my liking but there’s a restraint and simplicity imposed by and evoked through the use of shades of gray that I find soothing.
Perhaps because it evokes the now beige ivory pieces I remember plowing through as a graduate student, searching for tiny crowns in the tiny head of a tiny Virgin. Back when things were a little easier, even if not in the eyes.
This is just gorgeous. Thank you for sharing.
deeply enjoyed