The Forgery of Venus Read Online Free PDF

playing with visual reality in a way that wouldn’t appear again in Western art until the mid-nineteenth century. In fact, hesaid, Manet got all that business of flat tonality and bold clean outlines from this painting, and there wouldn’t be anything like the blurred treatment of the lady dwarf until the twentieth, it was like something out of de Kooning or Francis Bacon.
    And the perfect, doomed little girl at the center, the most important little girl in the whole world, the heartbreaking look of pride and terror on her face, and the two attendant meninas, one superbly painted like her mistress, the other blocked in angular planes like a wooden doll, a little Cézanne avant le lettre (why? He didn’t know, a mystery) and the whispering nun and the waiting figure in a glory of yellow in the far doorway (terrifying! Who knew why?) and the unimportant king and queen in the dusty mirror, and every movement and gesture in the whole vast thing directing the eye to the guy with the mustache and the black tunic with the cross of a knightly order on it, standing calmly in the midst of it with his palette and brushes. He’s saying I made this all, my father told me, he’s saying I have stolen this moment from time, this is how God sees the world, each instant an eternity, and when the dwarfs and the dog and the nun and the courtiers and the royal family and their maids are forgotten dust, this will live and live forever, and I, Velázquez, have done this.
     
    I recall the expression on his face as he said it, and I guess I thought he was talking about himself, because at nine I thought my father was in the same class as Velázquez, the greatest painter in the world. No, not really true; I think after that trip to Europe, after really seeing the masters, even at nine I could tell the difference, and I think he could see that I could. Over the next year it made him increasingly cranky, more demanding, more authoritarian. He was the master; I was the student and always would be. But the fact is I’m better thanhe was, maybe not as far above him as Velázquez was above his own master, Pacheco, but a discernible gap. Not that I could actually say that or claim that, even to myself, and I wonder how Velázquez handled it. Of course Pacheco wasn’t his father, just his father-in-law, but still.
    All that crap came flooding back when I stood in front of Las Meninas for the second time and I realized that’s what I’ve always wanted from art, the ability to stand apart from the domestic whatever, the whispers, the favorites, the little cruelties.
    And, my friend, you’ll see that, in a strange and unexpected way, I have succeeded. But also you may be thinking, hey, isn’t this supposed to be about the painting? Why is he giving me all this crap about his sad life? Because it’s not just about the painting. It’s about whether my memory has anything whatever to do with what really happened. Figure that out and the painting is explained one way or the other. Therefore I spread my memories before you as with a trowel. Are there inconsistencies? Impossibilities?
    Pay attention, please.
     
    T he following day I met Suzanne Nore in the Prado.
    I never pick up girls in museums, I can’t see them when I’m in my art head, but there she was, looking at Velázquez’s equestrian Baltasar Carlos, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her, that mass of red-gold hair down to her butt. I waited until we were alone in the room and then I just started talking like a maniac about the painting, the unbelievable mastery of technique, the paint so thin that it runs, the weave of the canvas showing through, all done in one go with practically no corrections, look at the damn background, it’s like a sumi-e painting or an aquarelle, and the texture of the costume, he taps the brush here and there and your eye reads it like gold embroidery, andlook at the face, it’s practically a sketch but the whole psychology of the kid is stripped bare, and so on