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    The painter walked slowly along beside the harbour, as he always liked to do when his art did not keep him to his studio. He loved the busy, colourful scene presented by the place, with the hurry and bustle of work at the waterside, and sometimes he sat down on a bollard to sketch the curious physical posture of a labourer, or practice the difficult knack of foreshortening a path only a foot wide. He was not at all disturbed by the loud cries of the seamen, the rattling of carts and the monotonous sound of the sea breaking on shore. He had been granted those insights that do not reflect images seen only in the mind’s eye, but can recognise in every living thing, however humble or indifferent, the ray of light to illuminate a work of art. For that reason he always liked places where life was at its most colourful, offering a confusing abundance of different delights. He walked among the sailors slowly, with a questing eye, and no one dared to laugh at him, for among all the noisy, useless folk who gather in a harbour, just as the beach is covered with empty shells and pebbles, he stood out with his calm bearing and the dignity of his appearance.
    This time, however, he soon gave up his search and got to his feet. The merchant’s story had moved him deeply. It touched lightly upon an incident in his own life, and even his usual devotion to the magic of art failed him today. The mild radiance of that picture of the Virgin painted by the young Italian master seemed to illuminate the faces of all the women he saw today, even if they were only stout fishwives. Dreaming and thoughtful, he wandered indecisively for a while past the crowd in its Sunday best, but then he stopped trying to resist his longing to go back to the cathedral and look at the strange portrayal of that beautiful woman again.

    A few weeks had passed since the conversation in which the painter agreed to his friend’s request for a second picture to complete the altarpiece for the Mother of God, and still the blank canvas in hisstudio looked reproachfully at the old master. He almost began to fear it, and spent a good deal of time out and about in the streets of the city to keep himself from brooding on its stern admonition and his own despondency. In a life full of busy work—perhaps he had in fact worked
too
hard, failing to keep an enquiring eye on his true self—a change had come over the painter since he first set eyes on the young Italian’s picture. Future and past had been wrenched abruptly apart, and looked at him like an empty mirror reflecting only darkness and shadows. And nothing is more terrible than to feel that your life’s final peak of achievement already lies just ahead if only you stride on boldly, and then be assailed by a brooding fear that you have taken the wrong path, you have lost your power, you cannot take the last, least step forward. All at once the artist, who had painted hundreds of sacred pictures in the course of his life, seemed to have lost his ability to portray a human face well enough for him to think it worthy of a divine subject. He had looked at women who sold their faces as artist’s models to be copied by the hour, at others who sold their bodies, at citizens’ wives and gentle girls with the light of inner purity shining in their faces, but whenever they were close to him, and he was on the point of painting the first brushstroke on the canvas, he was aware of their humanity. He saw the blonde, greedy plump figure of one, he saw another’s wild addiction to the game of love; he sensed the smooth emptiness behind the brief gleam of a girlish brow, and was disconcerted by the bold gait of whores and the immodest way they swung their hips. Suddenly a world full of such people seemed a bleak place. He felt that the breath of the divine had been extinguished, quenched by the exuberant flesh of these desirable women who knew nothing about mystical virginity, or the tremor of awe in immaculate devotion to