Manual of Painting and Calligraphy Read Online Free PDF

former directors, and it was the board which decided (to avoid the absurdity of commissioning once again a portrait taken from a photograph, as happened when S.’s father died and the painter was called Henrique Medina) that the present managing director should have his portrait painted while still alive and that it be put in the fourth frame hanging to the right as one entered. S. agreed to having his funeral pyramid erected, and I was chosen (now that Medina had retired) to open and seal the secret chambers. Using different words, S. told me these things (except for those I discovered later) in case I should hear about them in some other manner, and I charitably began mixing the colors on my palette as I listened. I could see the absurdity, but absurdity cannot bear being watched, nor is it necessary in order to feel greater hatred and contempt. S. showed himself to be detestable: one more turn of the screw. As for me, next day I mounted a fresh canvas on the easel in the storeroom and made a start on the second portrait.
    Were it not for my meticulous craftsmanship, which substitutes minute detail for talent and close observation for rapid intuition, I should be unable to describe this exterior of the SPQR which extends inside like a thermos flask, concealing the machinery, chemistry, or who knows what which constitutes the core of any large business concern. Let me try to explain. When I went to the SPQR to study the chamber, the light, the ambience where I would hang my painting (and I could have spared myself the time and effort had it not been for my professional scruples), I first looked at the façade of the building, which I barely remembered, and once inside I felt as if I were moving around an inner façade which extended into walls, furniture, the faces of employees, carpets, black telephones, clear varnish, an even temperature, the clean smell of polished wood, a surface as opaque as a tiled façade rising on three floors in a square which looks almost provincial. It was also like entering the mouth of a sleeping giant, sliding along the walls of his gullet, passing through his stomach and reemerging simply through the orifice of a body, through mucous membranes successively transformed, as remote from the circulation of blood vessels and the functioning of glands as something about to be rejected through the elasticity of the epidermis. I should therefore add that being able to speak of what I saw, I do not know what I saw, I have not transformed it into knowledge. Not yet.
    I hate saying
azulejo,
not to mention having to write the word here. As far as I can see (I am not referring to what I have achieved, for I am merely an academic painter), there are no more colors to be invented. Combining two, I produce a thousand, combining three a million, combining seven the infinite, and if I were to mix the infinite, I should regain the primordial color in order to make a fresh start. No matter that these colors have no name and cannot be given a name; they exist and multiply. But I detest this word (shall I learn to detest others?) glued to things which do not correspond:
azulejo
suggests blue, made of blue, bluish, blueness, bearing no resemblance to these tiles which have no blue, these squares of painted clay which form an overlay in gold, orange, red and ocher, with an imponderable silver dust which might be in the glaze, on the façade of the SPQR. At certain times of the day this façade is visible and invisible, the sun beating down at a certain angle transforms the multiplied flower into a single mirror; an hour later the outlines are restored, the colors regain their purity as if the glaze had caught and retained only as much light as was needed for human eyes that do not want to see less but must not see too much, at the risk of no longer seeing what they wanted but only seeing what they preferred not to see. There is a friendly rapport between the eye and the skin which the eye sees. And perhaps blindness