Clips of Humphrey tuning, plucking haltingly, and finally playing (I had to look it up) a theorbo in the refuge of his cell. It’s a hefty, fourteen-stringed lute, and probably stands about five feet. It is by all appearances very loud.
“According to Humphrey,” Carson’s narration adds, “What Father Archibald was also doing was waiting for my brother to find a way to fit in.”
“One of the first things that happened when I came here,” Humphrey says, over footage of his theorboic tinkering, “was realizing that my desire for solitary atonement was already waning. Even though it was a primary condition of my coming here. It was as if stepping onto this mountain satisfied everything I’d asked from Solano. I knew enough that I had to keep to it, mainly because I was skeptical of this supposed satisfaction. I thought, maybe there was something that could still be gained from living in solitary, meditative isolation. But at the same time I didn’t see how I could go through that again.
“And, I didn’t want to be entirely avoided or anathema to the life of Mashipan. Finding a way, bridging that, was a tough lesson. Wanting to be integral to something for the first time. Because I admired the men for their contemplative, meditational rigor, I wanted to help them, in whatever direction it could take. I really dwelt on that. And I started to remember how I did that with Peter, forming a relationship.”
“What Humphrey came up with,” Carson continues, “was assigning himself what he called artistic curatorial duties. He had found a way to appreciate Peter’s religion by studying it. And so, without anyone’s permission, he began gathering, archiving, and exhibiting Christian art, and music, too. Art which in its ancient day was meant to be devotional, which used its beauty and coherence to represent the divine. But, whose sorrows and joys, Humphrey felt, could be experienced by anyone without needing any underlying Christian ideas. They could be enjoyed as worldly sorrow, or worldly joy. Paintings honoring the Virgin became paintings honoring the wonder of biological, carnal motherhood. Motets exulting the death of Jesus become fragile songs of mourning and pity.”
Photos of Humphrey typing on a wooden desk in the faint light of his cell; sitting on a stool at a payphone somewhere busy and secular and linoleum floored, like a library. At work on his curatorial calling.
“You can say it got started by boredom, my boredom of being here,” Humphrey says.”But I was curious, with a lot of time on my hands. So I started phoning or writing other monasteries, churches, seminaries, Catholic universities, all around the world. I ordered textbooks on the history of art, looked them over, and find something that interested me. I would go down to the bottom to the photo credit, find the name of the collection and then contact them. I would ask if they wouldn’t mind sending us such and such painting or illuminated manuscript or icon or what have you, for devotional study and contemplation. And usually, that was all I needed to say.”
Humphrey smiles at his own naivete. “That was what I thought that art was specifically for: literally, like a guide or instructional manual for devotion.”
“How did they react? The people you called.”
“Uncertain. Skeptical. Bureaucratic. At first. But somehow they would grasp what I was asking for and go along.”
Of the photos and images of Humphrey among crates and boxes and ledgers recording shipping details and insurance, a short video clip stands out: standing among yet another shipment, he pulls a framed work with both hands out of a crate, carefully. The look on his face is astonishment. Someone off camera says “Oh my god,” and the camera shakes a bit from tittering. Humphrey turns it to the camera, an exquisite gold leaf and lapis lazuli Madonna and Child, from who knows where or by whom. But with the lovely flat absence of perspective, it couldn’t be any more recent than the 12 or 13th century.
“This is incredible,” Humphrey says, though you’re not too sure if he means the painting or that he’s sorry he’s gotten away with something.
“Something would make sense to a librarian or archivist, as if no one had ever asked to do this before and yet made a world of sense, and they would agree. So long as the destination of the art would be another monastery, they were fine with it. Eventually, the thinking became why not have a moving collection of Christian art, rotating from monastery to seminary to church and back again to support veneration, devotion, adoration, by the clergy? And just the clergy. After awhile, this intricate lending system started to develop.”
“It reminds me of corporations who buy or lease incredible works of art, original Warhols or Renoirs or Pollocks just for their foyers or employee cafeterias,” Carson says.
“Interesting. I didn’t know that. But I can see that – so long as the art is for people we accept or understand. At least, that’s how I think they understood this.
“Like I said, I was coming from this notion that if someone was going to concentrate their life on contemplating this one thing, this religion, especially one fragment of this religion, at the expense of everything else in this world, then there should be some aesthetic reward or challenge or representation, or just pleasure, involved. And I would try to make that happen for them.
“And yourself.”
“And me. Especially me. I wanted to surround myself with these beautiful, out of reach things.”
“At the same time,” Carson explains, “or maybe because of this, a small renaissance began taking place among the brothers of Mashipan. The tuffets they made as a devotional craft and sold to the public for a few cents, were never really big enough to be used outside of a doll house originally. But they began to grow bigger, more ambitious.”
A photo of the sewing shop, populated by tables of sewing machines and happy monks showing off their tuffets gives way to another picture, of a tuffet held in someone’s palm, depicting the Flight to Egypt. The sewing is not great; Mary and Joseph and the donkey look like 8-bit video game characters. It’s the next photo, of something the size of a body pillow, that’s really stunning: a body-length huggable pillow of Jesus on the cross at Calvary, with incredible stitching and detail.
“Brothers not inclined to sew took on carpentry. Tables, hutches, prayer benches, alter pieces. And famously, this enormous ministerial chair, made for Father Archibald Solano, illustrated with scenes of the Temptation of Christ. Mashipan brothers were not without irony.”
And there is the photo, of Father Archibald given the chair and his first test drive seating. It’s a sweet, lively moment.
On Carson, in his brother’s spare apartment. “You told me once that you began to lose interest in what was becoming a lively business, importing and exporting works of Christian art, because somehow it worked only when the loans went from one religious place to another.”
“That’s what happened. They already knew they could make decent enough money with loans, permanent loans to museums, or selling these works of art to collectors. But because of that, there was this understanding that we or I could not involve the public. It was a conflict of interest. Meaning their interest. Not that they admonished me or threaten me about it. There was simply this understanding. Don’t invite the public.
“Which I ignored, mostly. Though that was hard, getting these things to the public. Bringing people up here was impossible, mainly because the rules forbade it. But bringing the art down to the valley was also really hard, even though we tried it. Once or twice.”
A couple of these events, reminiscent of a poorly attended episode of Antiques Roadshow: people milling around wooden icons on a card table; a small family, with kids standing in front of a painting propped on a chair in what looks like a high school gymnasium. Other pieces recline in the background on a bleacher while a small group of musicians play early instruments at half-court, with a mascot of a high velocity bearcat dribbling a basketball beneath them.
“But mainly, for a number of years, the art and ancient codices of music and manuscripts came and went mainly for us. And then more than not – just for me. A pageant of beautiful of pieces of art just ... for me.”
/> The painting of Fra’ Angelico’s Saint Lawrence Receiving Treasures of the Church which, as the camera pulls back, is being held like a trophy fish by Humphrey in Mashipan. It is another astonishment, considering this is a nine by seven fresco held at the Vatican.
“You must have finally made a good impression on the brothers here,” Carson asks.
Humphrey doesn’t appear to take much from that. “I don’t know if they were all that impressed. Some probably were. But at the same time, I was still a disruptive presence here. When certain works came in from the Vatican, because they came from the Vatican ... that started to be a problem.”
“How?”
“Well, though many of these men were liberal, it’s liberalism in the sphere of a conservative church. For others who were truly liberal, they were thoroughly liberal and suspicious of authority in a hierarchical institution. So when these things started coming from the Vatican, some of them began wondering what was going on. Nervously. What was I doing here? Who was this guy with a direct line to the Vatican? I was accused of trafficking, money laundering. I told them no one is more surprised here by my luck than I was. At the same time, the authorities in the Vatican, they also grew very suspicious.”
“I think you told me they were alarmed.”
“They were. Completely.”
Back to the beautiful fresco of San Lorenzo as well as a short parade of other Vatican pieces: Humphrey with panels of Bernardo Daddi’s Stories from the Life of St. Stephen at his feet; holding up a Faberge egg depicting Mary at the burial cave; cataloging at his desk with Carravaggio’s Entombment leaning against a table leg; a few of the brethren holding and admiring a (13th c.?) processional cross.
“I began receiving anxious letters from my contact, Mr. Borragio, in the Vatican’s General Services Administration, all of a sudden requesting copies of archdiocesan or pontifical permission. And when I replied I had none, Cardinal Costanza came onto the scene. He began contacting me and Solano, alternately threatening and pleading to stop what we were doing, though he wasn’t entirely certain what it was.”
Back to Humphrey who apparently is still amused. “It was a scandal, or it turned into one. Newspapers. Articles. Vatican tribunals. Everything, the art exchange program, then Solano’s appointment and ultimately Mashipan’s incorporation, it all started to unravel. At least as far as Rome’s relationship to us.
“Which couldn’t have been a surprise. Or really a big deal, right? You were all going in that direction any way.”
“We were. For our part, we were already debating defection. Though that was coming internally, of our own doing. But certainly, because of the Vatican’s near hysteria over the art, coupled with men’s concerns here that someone here was in direct communication with the Vatican, there was ... much worry and suspicion. To put it mildly.”
“All because of items like this,” Carson says, over another of Angelico’s St. Lawrence Vatican frescoes, the Arraignment Before Valerianus, in a photo, being admired by two or three brothers and Solano himself.
* * * * *
Part Eight
In which Mashipan’s slow defection from the Church commences, because of household
chores, and its new mission comes to pass; also, Carson's Christmas abruptly ends,
so does his movie (though much less abruptly), and also this story.