Cézanne, The Large Bathers: When the Body Became Architecture

Standing before Paul Cézanne's The Large Bathers, the narrator feels he has entered a building without doors, roofed with branches, walled with trees, floored with water and earth, and held up by silent human bodies as columns. He questions each part in turn: the bodies say Cézanne made them masses entering the geometry of the place, with arms as lines and shoulders as arches, and the leaning trees say they form an arch because the painting needs a roof. The water calls itself a passage between earth and sky, the trees remind him that nothing in nature is eternal, the dispersed light, unlike Rembrandt's, chooses no hero, and the void between the bodies claims the architect's attention as what is never built yet gives building its meaning. He reads the nakedness as a critic of art before anything else, and when he speaks of faith the painting asks him to let art open a window and then look through it himself, without turning the canvas into a painted Qur'an or its artist into a prophet. He leaves carrying the arch of trees and the stillness of water, sure that here the painter met the architect within him, and closes by saying that Cézanne painted nature and he raised his eyes toward its Creator.