Gary LeBel
from A Copy of a Copy
1. HEAD OF A BERBER, Greek, c. 350 B.C.E.
Your eyes, once glass, how much they still reveal for we seem to see right through you to the heart the unknown sculptor saw then shaped
Your curls betray your origin in lands beneath the fortieth parallel. Your brow is as calm and level as your desert lands, your strength and resilience gifts from surrounding mountains in which you may have been born. Were you a soldier, slave, a chieftain? Those terms dissolve, devolving to a simpler word, a man
like any other, like no other.
It’s obvious that your shaper saw the best in you, bold in character, fearless, honest, resolved and even-handed, a man who found an end in character where so many others search a lifetime or never look: who could believe those eyes had not seen deeply into the souls of children and the very old,
and though your glass is gone and your eyes are continents deep we wish for mirrors like yours to reflect back to us our better natures
2. VELVET
No doubt Petrus Christus painted the young girl as he saw her, sullen perhaps, harboring painful secrets, or housebound and thus locked away from the sunshine and the village children free as sparrows that flit and glide through the woods behind her parents’ manor home,
or perhaps it’s the look of early ambition, an adamantine will forged in the awareness of her superiority by dint of birth, or is her gaze reflecting the rigid armor her spirit wears to shield and harden itself for the life she already knows is waiting, as it had for her older sisters, her female cousins, bound in the shackles of a marriage merging houses, or one of convenience to an old rich noble to conceal his sexuality, or it may be that she’d spent the morning before Petrus came to paint her reading Christine de Pisan and longing beyond all hope to become a citizen of her fabulous City of Women—
what worlds Master Petrus has compressed into a panel less than a foot square in a work that’s arguably infused with more mystery than even the much larger paintings of his contemporaries, the brothers Van Eyck,
for what inscrutability lurks beyond the dress, the necklace, the cap, the raiment of the favored. . . and one wonders what fifteenth century eyes once saw as they passed by the nook where her image was hung, tight-lipped with a glass-cutting glance, wise with a cynicism beyond her years, proclaiming loudly to themselves with a grin as they passed her portrait, “Oh yes, now that’s our Greta.”
Parting her velvet drapes, she watches keenly as two serving girls run toward each other, arms agape with joy and laughter soon to be wrapped round one another
Petrus Christus (c. 1400-1473) Portrait of a Young Girl. Berlin, Staalt. Museen
About the Author
Gary LeBel is an artist-poet living in the greater Atlanta area whose poems have appeared in journals throughout the USA, the UK, Japan, and India. He believes that art, or anything else worth doing, is a life-long pilgrimage.