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Pure Devotion
The Day Laid on the Altar
by Adria Bernardi.
Middlebury College Press/University Press of New England, 2000.
210 pages.
Reviewed by Michael Wilt
In The Day Laid on the Altar, Adria Bernardi transports the reader to the mountains and cities of sixteenth-century Italy, and into the lives and work of several artists. Combining historical and fictional characters, Bernardi engages the many facets of the artist -- creator and visionary, technician and businessman, mere mortal subject to suffering and death. The novel's scope and prose, its breadth of vision and Bernardi's way of presenting detail, compel the reader through the story's multiple settings and decades to its final image of an artist's pure devotion to his work.
Bernardi begins with the fictional Bartolomeo de Bartolai, a mountain-dwelling shepherd with an artistic temperment and a fascination with mosaics. To excel in the arts, one must leave the mountains; but Bartolomeo "will never leave the mountains. He will soothe the foreheads of his elders, and the past will be his future." One of his townsmen, Martin de Martinelli, also has an artistic bent. But Martin's is accompanied by worldly ambition, and the cities -- Fiorenza first, and later Venezia -- draw him from the mountains, and he learns the specialized trade of preparing plaster walls for frescoes.
Remind yourself of the rules for wall preparation, so that when you step off this creaking barge, you will disembark with vigor:
Sweep the wall and wet it down thoroughly.
The lime must be at least fifteen years old.
Apply plaster with a trowel unevenly. Apply it at the boundaries of light and dark.
Apply color more deeply than it is intended to be seen.
Years pass as the these men toil, offstage, and the narrative turns to the artist Titian. At the age of seventy-one, Titian is working to solidify his estate so that his work can continue beyond his lifetime. We see little of Titian at his work. Rather, he is the artist as businessman, dealing with matters of finance, property, family squabbles, and the loss of loved ones. The reader who is aware of Titian's brilliant artistic legacy will feel pained by the events leading to and following Titian's death, but they will also sense the genius of the man and the power that drove him.
Other characters -- Titian's sons and daughter, and a model-turned-housekeeper -- add dimension to Bernardi's portrayal of Titian. We see him as if through their lenses. But the story circles back to the mountains. There, Bartolomeo, now an old man, prepares his final work, unknowingly connected to Titian and his tradition. Bartolomeo's work is his ritual, his ritual is his work.
He recites what he was told as a child, a chant, a prayer, a work song:
The day laid on the altar is sacrificed. It is laid upon the threshing floor, laid upon the worn-out stone.
Bartolomeo is true to his vision and his gift, and its sacrifice makes it truly whole.
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