The Shadow Catcher

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Let me tell you about the sketch by Leonardo I saw one afternoon in the Queen’s Gallery in London a decade ago, and why I think it haunts me. The Queen’s Gallery is on the west front side of Buckingham Palace, on a street that’s always noisy, full of taxis rushing round the incongruous impediment of a massive residence in the middle of a route to Parliament and Westminster Abbey and, more importantly, a train station named Victoria. The Queen’s Gallery is small, neither well maintained nor adequately lit, and when I went there to see the Royal Collection of Da Vinci drawings, the day was pissing rain and cold and damp, and the room smelled of wet wool seasoned in the lingering aroma of fry-up and vinegar, an atmosphere far removed from the immediacy, muscularity, and sunny beauty of Da Vinci’s subjects. There were drawings of male adolescents, drawings of chubby infants, drawings of rampant horses, toothless women, old men with spiky white hairs on their noses and boils on their chins — and then, in a corner, there was a different kind of sketch, a map. It was drawn in ochre on a sheet of rough, uneven rag approximately the size of ordinary letter paper, the same color as southern California sandstone. I stood in front of it for something like too long because a guard stepped forward ’til I leaned away, still looking at it, mesmerized. Some things you remember for a lifetime; other things, mysteriously, bleed away, or fade to shadow. Sometimes, you try to bring the memory of something back, and can’t. You try to see a face, recapture love, recapture rapture; but it’s gone, that face, that vibrancy. Other images return without your bidding.

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