Michael Gruber - The Forgery of Venus

Then a knock and she is here, dressed in a heavy black velvet cloak to the floor, hooded and masked, a silk scarf of pale green about her neck. She removes the mask, throws back her hood. She has tied up her hair on top of her head in imitation of the Venuses of Titian and Caracci and of the Medici Venus, I mean the famous statue that is the root of all art devoted to the female form. We speak a little, the weather, the cold; she apologizes for her lateness and then we stand dumb. I have never painted a woman of rank, nude, from the life. There is no precedent, manners are no guide.

She gestures to the couch. “Shall I be a reclining Venus, there?”

“If you please, señora,” I say, “and there is your mirror.”

She walks over and looks at it. “Not a mirror for a goddess, I think. And it is a wall mirror. How am I to gaze at my beauty while reclining on your couch?”

I am ashamed I have not thought of this and I am mute with embarrassment.

She says, “If you had a cupid holding it at her feet, propped up on the couch, she could lie on her back and gaze. You could paint in the child later.”

I agree this is worth trying; I croak, in fact, my throat is so dry. I say, “You may undress behind that screen.”

“I don’t need your screen,” she says, and takes off her cloak. Beneath it she is all alabaster skin, not a stitch on her.

“May I spread my cloak and lie on it? It is cold in this room. Will it spoil your colors?”

“No, please,” I say, stammering. I turn my back to take up my palette and brushes, and when I again look to the couch she is lying on her back, relaxed, her thighs lolling open, revealing the dark curls at her groin and a tiny sliver of pink sex.

“How shall I arrange my limbs, Don Diego? Shall I have my hand here like Titian’s Venus, covering myself modestly? And the other behind my head, like this?”

“Yes,” I say, “that’s good. Turn your head a little, toward the mirror.”

Some adjustments of that damned mirror follow; leaning over her I can smell her, some dense perfume. I am sweating like a Seville porter. When I pick up brush and palette my hand shakes. I begin to block in the forms in gray-ochre; I can see her looking at me in the mirror, amusement in her eyes, the mocking whore!

I stop and put down the palette.

“What is wrong, Don Diego?”

“The pose. It’s awkward with you on your back like that, the line of your neck is clumsy…” And similar nonsense, but the fact is that I can neither bear to stare at her sex nor ask her to close her legs, and so I say, “Roll on your right side.”

“You wish to take me from the back, then?”

I ignore the coarse wit and say, “Yes, there is a statue I like, an antique hermaphrodite at the Villa Borghese-I am having it cast in bronze for His Majesty-which shows the back very well, and there is Annibale Caracci’s Venus with Satyrs, which shows the woman from the back as well. I think it would suit in this case…”

And similar babble, until she rolls slowly over and I adjust the black cloak, and the white linen showing through on both sides of this, and also a wisp of her green chiffon scarf. And now I need not stare at her breasts and their brown buds stiff with the chill, and the darker pink of her clam, and I can paint the line of her back, with just a little more adjustment. If it were a boy or a man I would simply shift the limbs or head with my hands, but now it is like painting the king, I must ask for small, important movements, the lower leg thrust a little forward so the mass of her upper ham falls naturally and the lower is compressed, and between them the light just striking that thin fold of flesh; yes, my lord the marqués will like that, I’ll make sure that shows, a tiny carmine lamp at the gates to paradise.

It is winter; there is little light left, and at four or so we stop and she wraps herself in the cloak again. She sits on the couch with her knees up like a little girl; the woman has no shame at all and yet is not degraded by it. We agree to meet tomorrow, but earlier this time, so as to catch the light.

But she does not come, instead sends a message that she was out late with the marqués, and I have to scurry to fill my day, uncanceling meetings and rushing about the city. I manage to arrange a final sitting with Cardinal Pamphili; his silly face is done and I can finish the rest here, his gown and the background and so on. But I am uneasy all the day and have the same unpleasant dreams, rooms full of strange light that shows the faces of people glowing like rotted corpses, yet no candle or fire to give it, and those people crying out in a language I don’t know.

She comes early, just after dawn, in the same black cloak, again naked beneath it.

“You must not think, Don Diego, that I travel through the city of Rome like this ordinarily,” she tells me, “but if I am dressed I must bring a woman along to undress me, and dress me again, my stays and laces and the rest-it is a disability of us women-and we wish to keep this painting our secret. Unless you would care to do that service?”

She sees my face and laughs. “I observe that it would not please you to serve me so. Therefore, let me take my pose.”

She does so and I paint. In the morning light her skin glows like pearl, and I brush in thin tints of lake mixed with flake white, always thin so that the white of the underpainting shows through, and plenty of calcite for transparency, tiny blended strokes so that the surface is perfectly smooth, as it would be to the hand’s touch. My fancy is that the light comes from within her, and I paint in the image in the glass, her face plain enough, and then I darken it and change it so that it could be any girl on the couch.

I work without stopping-I have lost count of the bells-until she complains of stiffness and the need to use the jakes. The figure is nearly done, and I say, a moment longer, I say, a few more strokes then, a little more modeling on the upper thigh, a bluish-gray, very thin. I put my brush down and gesture to her that she can move. She rises, groans, laughs, and with the cloak about her shoulders, she comes around and looks at the canvas.

“That arm is out of the drawing,” she says, “but I see why you did it, yes, the line of the back is made bolder, a desperate move, but it works. Look how thin the paint, the fabric shows through, what a miser you are! There is almost nothing there, but also everything, you compel the eye itself to make up the difference. Yes, my narrow waist, I am as proud as Satan of it, yet she is not much of a goddess, I think, but a mortal woman. I thank you for disguising my face, but you have my big culo to the life, and I believe some men would recognize me from that alone. Oh, Madonna, I am speaking like a whore again, I offend your Spanish sensibilities.”

She looks me in the face, smiling, showing her teeth like a peasant. She says, “I do it only because I hate you. This, seeing this work, makes me want to break my brushes. I would give my soul to be able to make flesh shine like that. Heliche will die when he sees it; it is just the kind of thing he likes. I imagine he will find some way of looking at it while he enjoys his new mistress.”

“Are you sure he has one?”

“Oh, yes, in that realm I am an expert, as you are as a painter.”

“And have you been fobbed off upon one of his train, as you foretold?”

“Indeed, I have,” she says.

“Who is it?” I ask, stupidly.

“Why, it is you, Velázquez,” she says. “Who else?”

She slips out of her cloak and comes to me, pressing her hot body against me, her mouth against my mouth, her tongue darting in like a little fish.

“And what do you think of love, Velázquez?” she says between kisses. “Do you think it is an art, like painting, or a mere craft that any churl or whore may accomplish well enough, or is it even less, a spasm of the flesh, akin to what the beasts do, that we inherit from the sin of Eve?”