Sunday, October 22:
Gray weather again! And various woes. But R. begins his article for the Blätter. Also, there was one thing which pleased him: Siegfried’s whistling (something from Der fliegende Holländer) very early in the morning. When I go in to him at 12:30, he shows me the sheet of paper and says, “My tears gush forth; once more the pencil claims me!”
Toward one o’clock we go off to the Belle Arti; R. looks at many things with great calmness and concentration, among them the Carpaccios; he prefers the Saint John in Tintoretto’s Crucifixion to the Saint John in the Assunta, and in respect of his appreciation of this great work, I see to my joy that he is increasingly coming around to my feeling about it. Only the luxurious clothing of the bowed women disturbs him somewhat, as well as the excessive number of people. On our return home, we discuss the difficulties of painting Christ, and R. agrees with me when I observe that it is impossible, and that the painters sought a solution either by typifying him or by making a portrait.
Lunch with friend Rubinstein, a toast to my father, departure of Rub. The rose cup. No outing for R. in the afternoon, since it begins to rain! I pay him a visit and find him quite cheerful, reading the Blätter. However, a letter from Dr. Strecker, which R. asks me to answer, obliges me to tell him that a reply from Frau Lucca has indeed arrived; he does not wish to read it, but all the same it leads to discussions! The elder children have gone off to bed, I visit them, and in the meantime R. plays to the younger ones.
By the time they leave us the difficulties have been more or less forgotten, and R. begins, “One cannot paint Christ, but one can portray him in music.” I say that I see it as evidence of his great and so significant artistic sagacity that he abandoned the figure of Christ and created Parsifal instead: “To have Christ sung by a tenor - what a disgusting idea!” he says. From this we go on to painting - that it was able to depict the Mother of God. But R. denies that the Assunta is the Mother of God; it is Isolde, he says, in the apotheosis of love, whereas in the Sistine Madonna, “this wonderful inspiration,” one sees, for all the consummate beauty, her utter unapproachability: “Good Lord, to have any ideas about her!” “So transfigured that it takes one’s breath away.” “And that gaze, so sublime, even in her!” “And at the same time everything so graceful and beautiful.” Thus calmed and raised above reality by the images of art, we go off to rest. However, it was not a good night. At 4 in the morning of