In the Permanent Collection

Permanent Collection

24 PERMANENT COLLECTION In the gallery of casts, a copy of the broken Laocoön, improperly restored, extends his right arm up from the shoulder. I would have guessed the same about how to position it, not only for drama in reaching to the gods, but also because it lengthens the taut diagonal of his strained torso and left thigh. His young sons, too, stretch fingers to the sky. His mouth falls open in a noble kind of agony. Twice a day I pass a more modest bit of sculpture: in the window of a law office, two birds cast in metal, not in flight but focused on the ground, looking for crumbs maybe, matte grey heads turned away from one another. Image not of crisis but grim forbearance, these birds seem made to withstand and at the same time made for nothing at all, and in this they make me think of my father, to whose mouth there was nothing classical, who squinted into his life as if it were hard to look at. As far as I know, he had few ideas about art, probably wouldn’t have paid much attention to the photo on the cover of his funeral program, but among the brocade colors of its still-life fruits and flowers, the open throat of a French horn was trite and a little distasteful. Really I came today to see some borrowed Parisian lithographs. But then, as I’m heading upstairs, another copy stops me, the drain cover set into floor tiles a miniature of the old priest Laocoön’s head and torso. He’s alone this time, arm posed the way scholars now think is right, bent at the elbow, 25 fist pulled back behind his head. The art in this fixture is as weird to me as those ghosts of masterpieces crowded into a room painted bluer than sky could ever be, where among the gods and soldiers, just to the side of the little family bound together by snakes, a woman from Herculaneum, her face set in a nurse’s bland concern, draws her wrap like a hood over her scalloped head, pleating the fabric with her bleached plaster hands. ...