Mirrors (27 page)

SHE WALKS LIKE AN ANGEL

Venus turned up one morning in the city of Sienna. They found her lying naked in the sun.

The city paid homage to the marble goddess buried during the Roman Empire, who had favored them by emerging from the depths of the earth.

She was offered the pinnacle of the city’s principal fountain as her home.

No one tired of gazing at her; everyone wanted to touch her.

But soon came war and its horrors, and Sienna was attacked and looted. In its session of November 7, 1357, the municipal council decided Venus was to blame. God had sent misfortune as punishment for the sin of idolatry. And the council ordered Venus, that invitation to lust, destroyed, and the pieces buried in the hated city of Florence.

In Florence, a hundred and thirty years later, another Venus was born from the hand of Sandro Botticelli. The artist painted her rising from the foam of the sea, with no more clothing than her skin.

And a decade later, when the monk Savonarola built his great bonfire of purification, it is said that Botticelli himself, repenting the sins of his brushes, fed the flames with some of the diabolical pranks he had painted in his youth.

With Venus, he could not.

DEVILCIDE

The great beak of a bird of prey crowned his figure wrapped in a long black cloak. Underneath the cloak, a horsehair shirt tormented his skin.

God’s wrath roared in his sermons. Father Girolamo Savonarola terrified, threatened, punished. His eloquence set the churches of Florence ablaze: he exhorted children to inform on their sinning parents, he denounced homosexuals and adulterous women hiding from the Inquisition, and he demanded that carnival be turned into a time of penance.

Pulpits burned with his holy ire, and in the piazza of the seigniory burned the bonfire of the vanities, stirred up night and day by his words. Ladies renounced pleasure and threw their jewelry, perfumes, and potions into the fire, alongside lascivious paintings and books that exalted the libertine life.

At the end of the fifteenth century, Savonarola too was tossed into the flames. Unable to control him, the Church burned him alive.

LEONARDO

When he was twenty-five, the watchdogs of public morality known as the Officers of the Night took Leonardo from the workshop of his teacher Verrocchio and plunked him in a cell. Two months he spent there, unable to sleep or breathe, terrified by the prospect of the stake. Homosexuality was punished by fire, and an anonymous tip accused him of “committing sodomy in the person of Jacopo Saltrelli.”

He was absolved for lack of evidence, and restored to life.

Then he painted master works, nearly all of them unfinished, which were the first to make use of sfumato and chiaroscuro,

he wrote fables, legends, and recipes,

he sketched the organs of the body perfectly for the first time, having studied anatomy from cadavers,

he proved that the world turned,

he invented the helicopter, the airplane, the bicycle, the submarine, the parachute, the machine gun, the grenade, the mortar, the tank, the moving crane, the floating dredger, the spaghetti-making machine, the bread mill . . .

and on Sundays he bought birds in the market and opened their cages.

Those who knew him said he never embraced a woman. Yet from his hand was born the most famous portrait of all times. A woman.

BREASTS

To avoid punishment, some homosexuals dressed up as women and passed themselves off as prostitutes.

At the end of the fifteenth century, Venice approved a law that obliged the professionals to show their tits. Bared breasts had to be displayed in the windows where they offered their services to clients walking by. They worked beside a bridge over the Rialto, which is still called the Ponte delle Tette.

ORIGIN OF THE FORK

They say Leonardo wished to perfect the fork by giving it three tines, but it ended up looking just like the trident of the king of hell.

Centuries previous, Saint Pietro Damiani decried that novelty from Byzantium:

“God would not have given us fingers if he wanted us to use that instrument of Satan.”

Queen Elizabeth of England and the Sun King of France ate with their hands. When the writer Michel de Montaigne ate in a hurry, he bit his fingers. Every time the musician Claudio Monteverdi felt obliged to use a fork, he purchased three masses to pay for the sin.

VISIT TO THE VATICAN

On the off chance he’ll answer, I ask Michelangelo:

“Why does the statue of Moses have horns?”

“In the fresco
The Creation of Adam
in the Sistine Chapel, we all fix our gaze on the finger that gives Adam life, but who is that naked girl God is casually yet lovingly caressing with his other hand?”

“In the fresco
The Creation of Eve
, what are broken branches doing in Eden? Who cut them? Was logging allowed?”

“And in the fresco
The Last Judgment
, who is the pope who has been punched by an angel and is tumbling down to hell carrying the pontifical keys and a bulging purse?”

“The Vatican concealed forty-one little penises that you painted in that fresco. Did you know that your friend and colleague Daniele da Volterra was the one who covered those crotches with cloths of shame by order of the pope, and for that reason earned the nickname
Il Braghettone
, the Underwear Man?”

BOSCH

A condemned man shits gold coins.

Another hangs from an immense key.

The knife has ears.

The harp plays the musician.

Fire freezes.

The pig wears a nun’s habit.

Inside the egg lives death.

Machines run people.

Each nut dwells in his own world.

No one meets up with anyone.

All are running nowhere.

They have nothing in common, save fear of each other.

“Five centuries ago, Hieronymus Bosch painted globalization,” to quote John Berger.

PRAISED BE BLINDNESS

In Siracusa, Sicily, back around the year 300, Saint Lucy gouged out her eyes, or had them gouged out, for refusing to accept a pagan husband. She lost her sight to win entry to heaven, and pictures show the saint holding a platter on which she offers her eyes to Our Lord Jesus Christ.