Old Souls

Second in the jesters series, after Tea Time.

The two of them have settled in under the chin of a god, as easy in his company as in their own. One leans against the other, in no hurry at all. Light comes in from the upper left and finds Apollo's cheek, the small faces below him and the white marble ledge they sit on. The man in the portrait is left to the dark.

The bust is the Apollo Belvedere, a marble copy of a lost Greek bronze. Through the nineteenth century, plaster casts of it stood in schools across Europe and America, and students learned to draw on that head.

Apollo carried a lyre as well as a bow, healed the sick, led the Muses and was patron to every musician, poet and physician in Greece.

Ivy has grown into Apollo's curls. It is not his plant; his crown is laurel, and the jesters know why. Daphne would not be caught. She decided her fate for herself and became a laurel tree, rooted and unbending, and he has worn its leaves ever since. The ivy belongs to Thalia, the Muse of comedy, who watches over jesters everywhere. Perhaps these two wove it through his hair themselves, smiling, when no one was looking.

Behind them, in a gilt frame, the Québec painter Georges Marcil looks out from his self-portrait. He is one more artist who sat down to study a face and chose his own.

Old souls, all of them, a fellowship spanning more than two thousand years. The jesters are well-read, longtime friends, searching together for a higher beauty: in art and verse, in nature, in peace.