This and That at the Frick

I bring my students to the Frick to see Frank

O’Hara’s beloved Polish Rider, and after giggling

at the work Bronzino did on the silver painted crotch

of Lodovico Capponi, whose silk sprouts like a big

snail or scrolled bedpost between his legs, we walk to the West Gallery

and all agree Rembrandt did a grand job. The young man is handsome,

his horse handsomer, especially its head. The rider

looks like he could dismount, meet O’Hara and

Ashbery at the San Remo or Cedar for drinks.

I get it. But across the hall, El Greco’s Vincenzo Anastagi,

despite every frippery, draws no titters.

Graying at the temples, he is armored at the chest and arms,

with a white ruffle around his neck. It escapes

his sleeves, too, bloomy as a rind of stinky cheese,

or egg whites whipped to stiff peaks.

Against this froth his uncultivated face, mid-length

beard, dark eyes—maybe kind, maybe sad. The green

velvet of impossibly puffy shorts does nothing

to lighten the weight of his eyes, nor does cloth

billowing behind him, a drapery from nowhere

come to hold him in relief. A color I can’t name. Not

red, not purple or brown. Like blood in a dream,

oiled as bone broth. What a strange word,

“relief,” which used to denote the body

of a dead person or any kind of remains, but now

means ease, deliverance from pain, or the impression,

in art, that a thing is raised above a surface. Vincenzo

is all these things at once, and I can’t wait to bring Louisa here—

Louisa, who this morning on the train said gross, reading

over my shoulder O’Hara’s description of

“laborers” who “feed their dirty/glistening torsos.”

Gross, she said, on the B train going over the bridge,

meaning O’Hara’s reduction of these toilers to objectified

working class trunks, and she was right, they’re never

just beautiful, these old things, these men’s things.