Titian Read Free Page A

twist its limbs! Unable to reproduce, he could transform and transfigure. Instead of being the servant of appearances, obliged to lick their boots, he could impose his will upon them. Produce arms or hands which could never exist. Bend limbs against their nature. Fuzz objects to the point of their becoming unrecognisable. Make contours tremble so that they came todepict matter without any outline. Deny the difference between bodies and corpses. (I’m thinking of the last
Pietà
.)
    I pack all kinds of questions concerning power, prestige, even the question of the dog, into this train of thought. The truth is that Titian’s art is itself untouchable, inviolable. It calls out and then it forbids. We remain open-mouthed.
    Kisses, Katya
    PARIS
    Kut
,
    Vanitas vanitatis
. In 1575, the Plague ravaged Venice, killing almost a third of the city’s inhabitants. The old man, aged nearly a hundred, died from the Plague in 1576. As did his son. After their deaths, their house on the Biri Grande, full of pictures and precious objects, was looted. And the following year, a fire in the Ducal Palace destroyed paintings by Bellini, Veronese, Tintoretto, and the old man.
    I see you today, not in the Piazza San Marco, but on the terrace of your flat in Athens. In Gyzi, where all the kitchens and bedrooms overlook one another, and the washing hangs between telephone cables and hibiscus flowers. Perhaps Athens is the antipodes of Venice? Dry, makeshift, ungovernable. A city of merchants, national heroes, and the widows of heroes, where nobody dresses up.
    And I’m writing in a Paris suburb, and I’ve been to the Sunday market. I saw young couples there, pale, poorly dressed against the rain, wearing jeans, hair lacquered, with city acne, holding hands, pushing prams, teasing in argot, each one with a thin, crooked-toothed recipe for happiness. And as I watched them I asked myself: What would they say about the
Flaying of Marsyas
? Who knows? Everyone lives legends.
    In the
Flaying of Marsyas
, a lapdog is licking drops of blood off the ground below where Marsyas is strung up. On the right, there’s another dog, held by a boy, who is very like the one in the painting with the pups.
    OK. Marsyas, the satyr-artist, entered a musical contest with the god Apollo and lost. Under the agreed conditions, the winner could do what he liked with the loser, and Apollo chose to flay the satyr alive! There are some convincing allegorical interpretations. But what interests me is why the old man chose this subject. It’s very close to what he told you in the gallery. Satyrs were, by definition, creatures who revealed how skin was like fur, and both were the outer coverings of a mystery. A kind of clothing which one couldn’t unbutton or unzip except with a killing knife.
    The two men in the Marsyas canvas, with their blades and their precision (I have seen peasants skin goats with exactly the same gestures), are the precursors of Fontana and Saura, who, in our century, slashed the canvases they painted in pursuit of what lay beyond the skin of the canvas, deep in the wound.
    But even after one has acepted the subject und interpreted it, one finds oneself face to face with something more startling! The scene (which in life would be an abominable scene of torture) is bathed in a light of honey and an atmosphere of elegiac fulfilment.
    You find exactly the same atmosphere in the
Nymph and Shepherd
, painted at the same time. Yet the
Nymph and Shepherd
is a love scene, and in it the shepherd is playing the pipes which cost Marsyas his life!
    Find the old man in Athens and ask him what he meant.
    It must be the season of pomegranates.
    Take care, John
    ATHENS
    John
,
    You’re right, it’s the season for pomegranates. I’m looking at one now. Split open by the centrifugal energy of its own ripeness. He would have been able to paint its vivid blood and its granular flesh – except that it’s too exotic, too eastern