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still, without a sound in the music of nothing, a rendezvous on the far side of waking up, with this rendezvous you’d seduce any man! And maybe that’s why it’s so much a painting about seduction. Not the shepherd seducing the nymph, or the nymph the shepherd. It’s the two of them with the old man seducing anyone who passes. Seducing with the promise of seduction.
    Today I’m sending you two postcards which are also about seduction. The portrait of the young Isabella d’Este. The old man painted her from imagination and from other portraits of her, when she was in fact sixty! And the
Girl in a Fur
, a portrait of a ‘Venetian Courtesan’. The model was one of Titian’s favourites at the time. When he painted it, he was forty-seven years old.
    All my love, John
    ATHENS
    John
,
    The painting of Isabella d’Este is to me more like a floral arrangement, a composition of textures, than a portrait ofa real noblewoman, closer to Arcimboldo than to Velasquez. Is this the result of painting a portrait from imagination instead of from a model?
    What makes it strange, however, is that its thrust is neither metaphysical (as with Arcimboldo) nor decorative. Once again, he wants us to touch the stuff, to put our hand inside – like Saint Thomas into the wound of Christ. He wants to make us feel it as palpable. And this is why dressed figures are sometimes nearer to nakedness than certain undressed ones. The more palpable, the more naked.
    The epitome of such ‘palpability’ is reached when he combines naked flesh with thick fur, as on the second postcard. Here we’re at the height of pictorial eroticism. We drown in it.
    The paleness of flesh against the darkness of fur, hair married to the pearls within it, the breast with its scarcely visible transparency and its discretion, which is nothing else but invitation, the eyes darker than jewels, and, finally, the slash in the sleeve, whose opening, pointed at by her fingers, is luminous and curly, artless and affected. Everything here implies pleasure – including the ring on the finger and the metal bracelet round the plump wrist.
    Jewels remind us, don’t they, of the pleasure we’ll lose when we’re dead, and how they and their precious stones will still be here? They console a body for its vulnerability. Come on, say the jewels, wear us and we’ll lend you some of our immutability.
    (The way she holds her waist is consoling, too – as if she were very gently rocking herself. I do exactly this after suffering some humiliation or slight abuse.)
    Jewels function a little like the old man’s art. They make flesh more flesh, they defy the raw perfection of nature, they mock mortality and they almost – but not quite alas! – reach eternity, from which everything comes and to which everything returns. Both his art and jewels are a human response to the arrogance of God, to God’s monopoly in Creation, to his implacable running of our destinies.
    Love, K
.
    TRAIN: GENEVA – PARIS
    Kut
,
    Might it be that all flesh is feminine – even the flesh of men? Maybe what is specifically male are men’s fantasies, ambitions, ideas, obsessions. Could their flesh be female?
    Love, John
    ATHENS
    John
,
    Titian, painter of flesh and guts, their rumblings and liquids. Painter of hair and the tamed beast in man. Painter of the skinas an entry or exit – like the shining surface of water for the diver, the surface to which he comes back after his dive to the depths of the body and its hidden organs, comes back with the secret of a
personality
. (Just look how much his portraits of men say about their inner life!)
    So, you have come to think that all flesh is feminine! The idea is, God knows, merely the result of a vast and ancient plot! Of course flesh is not only feminine! Maybe if women throughout the centuries have remained desirable – and you haven’t grown tired of it! – this is