An ageing artist, struggling with an unnamed degenerative illness, is inspired by a fresco in Venice to create one last great work. A meditation on love and creation, With or Without Angels is a fictional response to an artwork created by the late Scottish artist Adam Smith, itself inspired by the work of Giandomenico Tiepolo. Read ‘the old artist’s first encounter with the fresco in the extract below.

With or Without Angels
By Douglas Bruton
Published by Fairlight Books

The first afternoon the old artist spent at the Ca’ Rezzonico museum in Venice he saw only one picture – Giandomenico Tiepolo’s fresco of Il Mondo Nuovo, ‘The New World’. He wanted to climb up into the picture, to be a part of that crowd – and I am sure that ordinarily and for his own reasons he did not like crowds. He wanted to be pigment and paint and laid down for all time on a piece of wall. His eyes moved through the work, taking in each individual gathered together on Tiepolo’s fresco. He imagined himself young, a child running excitedly between the legs of the men in breeches and clutching at the long skirts of the women and stopping to stroke the arched neck of the dog – it was a yellow-brown whippet or a greyhoud and a little skittish from his petted attentions. A masked clown glared at him, growled, showing his teeth below a papier-maché hooked nose with wide nostrils and high roughed cheekbones. The old artist stared so hard at the picture that his eyes stung and began to water. 

It was quiet in the gallery room – not that he was entirely alone, but there was a church-hush all about him and the people there talked in hot whispers. He lay down on the floor in front of the picture, closed his eyes and slept. 

And the light in the gallery shifted, shadows crawling across the floor towards the far wall. 

Suddenly there was noise. Music playing somewhere. Maybe the man on the wooden stool with his arms in the air and holding a long wand, maybe he was conducting some street musicians. He would later pass round his three-cornered hat for the crowd to drop pennies into. And cheering there was, and laughter – though the laughter was far off. 

He could smell the perfume of the ladies – something with musk in it and flowers, mint perhaps and the sweetened wet earth mint grows in. And the well-dressed men smelled of rosewater, or those wearing the hats of common men smelled of fish and something sour, too, like meat that has hung too long in the sun or like milk when it has turned and the smell of it when the bottle is raised to the nose makes you jerk back as though stung. 

And there were dancers somewhere, dressed in carnival masks, or maybe they were juggling coloured wooden balls and the crowd was held, wanting the balls to clumsily drop and at the same time to stay spinning in the air, birling. 

The afternoon sun was high in the sky, and the air sweated and itched. 

Then he felt something tugging at his pockets – hadn’t they told him that he must be careful of pickpockets? ‘They are quick as mice and slippery as eels. You must keep your wallet close and your hand always guarding it.’ 

‘Signore, signore, it is done.’ 

He woke then. 

The young gallery attendant was leaning over him, shaking him. There was something gentle in his voice, even tender. Speaking like a lover, almost, and not with any note of censure at this man sleeping at the feet of Tiepolo’s Il Mondo Nuovo. 

‘It is time for the gallery to close,’ the young man said, smiling. 

With or Without Angels by Douglas Bruton is published by Fairlight Books, priced £9.99.