Titian Read Online Free PDF

partly due to this persistent lie, as old as the world, which proposes that flesh is a feminine attribute. But it’s a pure convention, whereby men use the bodies of women to speak of their own passive desires, their desire to behave with abandon, to lie suppliant on a bed. Men have delegated to women this aspect of lust. The woman’s body has become, not only the object but also the
ambassador
of masculine desire. Or, rather, simply of desire, regardless of gender. (The skin of men, where it is soft – have you noticed? – is softer than the skin of women …)
    Everywhere, female figures arch and wiggle themselves to embody something that transcends the sexes. Danaë, the nymphs, Venus, and even Mary, who poses piously as she receives Gabriel’s message, but who expresses exactly the same thing in each and every
Annunciation
: the desire that calls out, that begs, that offers its own vulnerability, its neck, its veins, its health (as in Dracula), its ‘virtue’ as the prudes would call it. Marsyas is a violent and extreme expression of the same passion. Of a wild fantasy for fusion. Apollo couldn’t bear his desire for the satyr any longer! Both weremale, both musicians. They had to meet under the skin, if not under the sheets. There you are: that is my version of the story! In other words, what Marsyas’ torturers are waiting to look at is what you call feminine flesh!
    In other words, if flesh became synonymous with femininity it was, I guess, less because of its texture than because man needed its qualities to express a hidden side of his own desire. The reason men have painted so many nudes is not only to enjoy being voyeurs, but to confess the unconfessable about themselves!
    I believe that women became more attractive, more sexy when they were made to reveal indirectly this unavowed desire that both male and female share. They became beautiful when this prescription of universal sexuality was tattooed upon their white and flabby flesh!
    Titian was the painter of flesh which commands rather than invites. ‘Take me.’ ‘Drink me,’ it orders. He may have disguised himself for me as an old man or as a dog, but he also disguised himself in women. Titian as Mary Magdalene, as Aphrodite!
    And here I think we come close to something concerning his power: he wore the disguise of everything he painted. He was trying to be everywhere. Competing with God. He wanted to create from his palette nothing less than life, and to rule over the universe. And his despair (the doubt you asked about) was that he couldn’t, like Pan,
be everything
. He could only create pictorially and wear disguises. His fearwas of being only a man, not a god as well, not a woman as well, not a forest as well, not a mist, not a lump of earth. Of being only a man!
    Danaë’s breast – so marvellous, so suggestive, and so impalpable – reveals, at one and the same time, all the limits and the triumph of his pictorial creation when compared with God’s.
    I love you, Katya
    PARIS
    Kut
,
    Do you remember me telling you about La Polonaise? Bogena, she’s called. She comes from a farm in eastern Poland. She came to Paris to work as a cleaner in people’s flats – often the flats of well-off Russian émigrés. Now she lives with Robert, who is an engineer, also from eastern Poland. Here in Paris, he works as a builder. Black labour. They live together in a studio flat in a suburb. Fifth floor – no lift. The flat, which is no bigger than a caravan, has seventy, eighty paraffin lamps arranged like ikons along the walls. All of them were bought in flea markets, then repaired, cleaned, polished and given new wicks. When he comes home in the evening, Robert lights four or five of them, and they sit for a moment to watch the flames.
    Two evenings ago, Bogena and Robert came to spend the evening because it was the Russian New Year. They broughtred, crystal glasses as a