The Zones of Paradise

LARDER WITH CHRIST AT EMMAUS

LARDERWITH CHRIST AT EMMAUS Joachim Beuckelaer ca. –, oil on wood This painter’s put his faith in foreground, loaded it with all the loot of orchard, garden, and the hunt: deep, wide basketfuls of figs, cherries, parsnips, plums, cartographies of cabbages, white knuckles of scallions, the raspberries’ small, huddled, complicated hearts. Two pheasants hang from a wooden beam, flanking a cord of songbirds strung through the throat. And there’s a slab from the butcher: a boar’s thigh hovering just above the tender avalanche of harvest, in darker versions of the perfect white of turnips and the flowers’ crimson froth. Wine’s suggested by the pewter pitchers. Bread’s tucked up on the highest shelf. It takes a long while for the eye to wander to the scrap of background—and then there’s the Christ, belittled by perspective and staggering in from a leaden smear of sky. Eyes and mouth shocked into pools of black, he’s lurching through the archway, his halflife of a heart panicked by the recent chastities of cross and grave, though two companions steady him, fellow travelers who won’t recognize him till his hands rip up the evening bread.Together, they occupy a space equal to the brainy cauliflower, or to the stack of polished, wooden plates.  In later rooms, the Dutch will tell stories with imported pomegranates, parrots, oysters, the carnal spectrum of blooms. Sometimes the reamed-out socket of a skull, placed among decanter, vase, and lute, will annotate the pleasure with its nasty footnote from the future. But here in this kitchen heaped with the ordinary, a smudge of spirit is still stalling at the threshold: wan fugitive reeling from the infinite, and starved for the sacrament of hunger, the ruddy pear incarnate.  ...