T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #2

This is the second post in my monthly series “T. J. Clark’s Ravishing Style,” a consideration of what makes Clark’s writing so distinctive and delectable. Each month I choose a favorite passage from his work and analyze its ingredients. Today’s pick is from his marvellous “Masters and Fools: Velázquez’s Distance” (London Review of Books, September 23, 2021). It’s a description of Diego Velázquez’s Aesop (1640):

The pucker and ripple of the grey and white fabric, with its visceral trace of pale red (a strange rhyming of the folds here with those on Aesop’s chest) – what are they, these folds? Is the dark material on top of the white another strip of leather? But what is the shape that seems to be holding it down? A weight of some sort? An opened shackle? One historian thought it a pasteboard crown. Did he mean as used in some court buffoonery? I don’t understand the trace of bright red at Aesop’s left ear, and the clamp of dark metal seemingly attached to the ear’s cartilage. Is it a mark of slave ownership?

Here we see many of the same elements contained in the Bosch passage that we looked at previously: the many questions (seven of them); the attention to color, especially red (“visceral trace of pale red,” “trace of bright red”); the attention to detail (“the clamp of dark metal seemingly attached to the ear’s cartilage”). The new ingredient here – the main reason I chose this passage (aside from its beauty, which is exquisite) – is Clark’s attention to the folds of Aesop’s sash: “The pucker and ripple of the grey and white fabric, with its visceral trace of pale red (a strange rhyming of the folds here with those on Aesop’s chest) – what are they, these folds?” Clark is a connoisseur of folds. Three examples: 

Let me start from a typical transfixing Leonardo detail, the unfolded yellow lining of the Virgin’s cloak. In the Paris picture (whatever the changes brought on by time) there was a connection, I am sure, between the yellow fold and the light in the sky. The lining, spellbinding as it is – separate from and superior to its being a condition of some stuff in the sun – is a dream condensation of the yellows of late afternoon. In Paris the lining still has softness: it is conceivable as folded, touched by human fingers. The yellow emerges, at first quite gradually, from under the stretched canopy of blue. It is the inside of a garment spilling out. We may see it as a concentration of the landscape light, but also as a way of bringing that far light closer – optically, seemingly accidentally – in a manner that viewers can accept as actually happening, here among the rocks. [“The Chill of Disillusion”]

Most great painters use folds and intersections of forms, especially of drapery, for purposes of exposition, laying out the world before us, turning the contours and edges of things slowly through space, having light modulate across a shifting but comprehensible surface. Rubens is a good example. Delacroix very often does the opposite. He folds and refolds things, filling every inch with colour, until a shape becomes a scintillation. (In Lion Hunt, the glimpse of crumpled green cloak beneath the lion’s midriff is a good example of such horror vacui. Or the billow of black, red and orange in the painting’s bottom left corner.) ["A Horse’s Impossible Head”]

Let’s turn aside from the questions of tipping and tilting in Cézanne for the moment and look at the question of folds. It is just as fundamental. The way man-made material, or even the continuous surfaces of the natural world – a screen of foliage, for instance, or the surface of the sea – the way such surfaces are folded and crinkled in order to catch the light: this is painting’s life blood. [“Cézanne’s Material,” included in Clark's great If These Apples Should Fall, 2022]

Clark’s sentence is worth quoting again: “The pucker and ripple of the grey and white fabric, with its visceral trace of pale red (a strange rhyming of the folds here with those on Aesop’s chest) – what are they, these folds?” Note the structure. We saw it in the Bosch passage, too: “The wandering lines of white on his costume, delicate even by Bosch’s standards, and dramatized by little dots and stitches applied to the belt, cap, guy rope and trailing flounces – what do they do?” Description, dash, question – a quintessential Clarkian combo. I love it.

Credit: The above illustration is Diego Velázquez’s Aesop (1640).