The Coming of Vertumnus: And Other Stories
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Synopsis
A collection of science-fiction short stories by the author of "Lucky's Harvest". They feature dozens of characters, a new way of travelling between the stars, a strange planet, magical powers, bravura set-pieces, and manoeuvres of narrative.
Release date: September 29, 2011
Publisher: Gateway
Print pages: 284
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The Coming of Vertumnus: And Other Stories
Ian Watson
Do you know the Portrait of Jacopo Strada, which Titian painted in 1567 or so?
Bathed in golden light, this painting shows us a rich connoisseur displaying a nude female statuette which is perhaps eighteen
inches high. Oh yes, full-bearded Signor Strada is prosperous – in his black velvet doublet, his cerise satin shirt, and his
ermine cloak. He holds that voluptuous little Venus well away from an unseen spectator. He gazes at that spectator almost
shiftily. Strada is exposing his Venus to view, yet he’s also withholding her proprietorially so as to whet the appetite.
With her feet supported on his open right hand, and her back resting across his left palm, the sculpted woman likewise leans
away as if in complicity with Strada. How carefully his fingers wrap around her. One finger eclipses a breast. Another teases
her neck. Not that her charms aren’t on display. Her hands are held high, brushing her shoulders. Her big-navelled belly and mons Veneris are on full show. A slight crossing
of her knees hints at a helpless, lascivious reticence.
She arouses the desire to acquire and to handle her, a yearning that is at once an artistic and an erotic passion. Almost,
she seems to be a homunculus – a tiny woman bred within an alchemist’s vessel by the likes of a Paracelsus, who had died only
some twenty-five years previously.
I chose this portrait of Jacopo Strada as the cover for my book, Aesthetic Concupiscence. My first chapter was devoted to an analysis of the implications of this particular painting …
Jacopo Strada was an antiquary who spent many years in the employ of the Habsburg court, first at Vienna and then at Prague,
as Keeper of Antiquities. He procured and catalogued gems and coins as well as classical statuary.
Coins were important to the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors, because coins bore the portraits of monarchs. A collection of coins
was a visible genealogy of God-anointed rulers. Back on Christmas Day in the year 800 the Pope had crowned Charlemagne as
the first ‘Emperor of the Romans’. The Church had decided it no longer quite had the clout to run Europe politically as well
as spiritually. This imperial concoction – at times heroic, at other times hiccuping along – lasted until 1806. That was when
the last Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II, abdicated without successor so as to thwart Napoleon from grabbing the title. By
then, as they say, the Emperor presided over piecemeal acres which were neither an empire, nor Roman, nor holy. Of course,
effectively the Habsburg dynasty had hijacked the title of Emperor, which was supposed to be elective.
History has tended to view the Habsburg court of Rudolph II at Prague in the late 1570s and 80s as wonky, wacky, and weird:
an excellent watering-hole for any passing nut-cases, such as alchemists, hermetic occultists, or astrologers – who of course,
back then, were regarded as ‘scientists’. Not that true science wasn’t well represented, too! Revered astronomer Tycho Brahe burst his bladder with fatal result at Rudolph’s
court, due to that Emperor’s eccentric insistence that no one might be excused from table till his Caesarian Majesty had finished
revelling.
Botanists were very busy classifying plants there, and naturalists were taxonomizing exotic wildlife (of which many specimens
graced Rudolph’s zoo) – just as Strada himself tried to impose order and methodology upon ancient Venuses.
Strada resigned and quit Prague in 1579, perhaps in irritation that his aesthetic criteria held less sway over Rudolph than
those of another adviser on the Imperial art collection – namely Giuseppe Archimboldo …
My troubles began when I received a phone call at Central St Martin’s School of Art in Charing Cross Road, where I lectured
part-time in History of the Same. The caller was one John Lascelles. He introduced himself as the UK personal assistant to
Thomas Rumbold Wright. Oil magnate and art collector, no less. Lascelles’ voice had a youthfully engaging, though slightly
prissy timbre.
Was I the Jill Donaldson who had written Aesthetic Concupiscence? I who had featured scintillatingly on Art Debate at Eight on Channel 4 TV? Mr Wright would very much like to meet me. He had a proposition to make. Might a car be sent for me, to
whisk me the eighty-odd miles from London to the North Cotswolds?
What sort of proposition?
Across my mind there flashed a bizarre image of myself as a diminutive Venus sprawling in this oil billionaire’s acquisitive,
satin-shirted arms. For of course in my book I had cleverly put the stiletto-tipped boot into all such as he, who contributed
to the obscene lunacy of art prices.
Maybe Thomas Rumbold Wright was seeking a peculiar form of recompense for my ego-puncturing stiletto stabs, since he – capricious
bachelor – was certainly mentioned once in my book …
‘What sort of proposition?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ said Lascelles, boyishly protesting innocence.
I waited. However, Lascelles was very good at silences, whereas I am not.
‘Surely you must have some idea, Mr Lascelles?’
‘Mr Wright will tell you, Ms Donaldson.’
Why not? Why not indeed? I had always revelled in paradoxes, and it must be quite paradoxical – not to mention constituting
a delicious piece of field work – for Jill Donaldson to accept an invitation from Thomas R. Wright, lavisher of untold millions
upon old canvases.
One of my prime paradoxes – in my ‘Stratagems of Deceit’ chapter – involved comparison between the consumption of sensual
fine art, and of visual pornography. I perpetrated an iconography of the latter based upon interviews I conducted with ‘glamour’
photographers on the job. No, I didn’t see it as my mission to deconstruct male-oriented sexism. Not a bit of it. That would be banal. I came to praise porn, not
to bury it. Those sumptuous nudes in oils of yore were the buoyant, respectable porn of their day. What we needed nowadays,
I enthused tongue in cheek, several tongues in cheek indeed – were issues of Penthouse magazine entirely painted by latter-day Masters, with tits by the Titians of today, vulvas by Veroneses, pubes by populist
Poussins … Ha!
I was buying a little flat in upper Bloomsbury, with the assistance of Big Brother Robert who was a bank manager in Oxford.
Plump sanctimonious Bob regarded this scrap of property as a good investment. Indeed, but for his support, I could hardly
have coped. Crowded with books and prints, on which I squandered too much, Chez Donaldson was already distinctly cramped.
I could hold a party in it – so long as I only invited a dozen people and we spilled on to the landing.
Even amidst slump and eco-puritanism, London property prices still bore a passing resemblance to Impressionist price-tags.
Perhaps eco-puritanism actually sustained high prices, since it seemed that one ought to be penalized for wishing to live fairly centrally in a city, contributing
to the sewage burden and resources and power demand of megalopolis, and whatnot.
Well, we were definitely into an era of radical repressiveness. The Eco bandwagon was rolling. Was one’s lifestyle environmentally
friendly, third-world friendly, future friendly? The no-smoking, no-car, no-red-meat, no-frilly-knickers, sackcloth-and-ashes
straitjacket was tightening; and while I might have seemed to be on that side ethically as regards the conspicuous squandering
of megamillions on paintings, I simply did not buy the package. Perhaps the fact that I smoked cigarettes – oh penalized sin!
– accounted in part for my antipathy to the Goody-Goodies. Hence my naughtiness in exalting (tongues in cheek) such a symptom
of unreconstructed consciousness as porn. Paradox, paradox. I did like to provoke.
How many lovers had such a tearaway as myself had by the age of thirty-one? Just three, in fact; one of them another woman,
a painting student.
Peter, Annie, and Phil. No one at the moment. I wasn’t exactly outrageous in private life.
Peter had been the prankster, the mercurial one. For his ‘God of the Deep’ exhibition he wired fish skeletons into the contours
of bizarre Gothic cathedrals, which he displayed in tanks of water. Goldfish were the congregations – was this art, or a joke? Several less savoury anarchistic exploits finally disenchanted
me with Peter – about the time I decided definitively that I really was an art historian and a critic (though of capricious
spirit).
Sending a Mercedes, with darkened windows, to collect me could have wiped out my street cred. Personally, I regarded this
as a Happening.
Mind you, I did experience a twinge of doubt – along the lines that maybe I ought to phone someone (Phil? Annie? Definitely
not Peter …) to confide where I was being taken, just in case ‘something happens to me …’ I didn’t do so, yet the spice of supposed danger added a certain frisson.
When my doorbell rang, the radio was bemoaning the death of coral reefs, blanched leprous by the extinction of the symbiotic
algae in them. This was sad, of course, tragic; yet I didn’t intend to scourge myself personally, as the participants in the programme seemed to feel was appropriate.
The driver proved to be a Dutchman called Kees, pronounced Case, who ‘did things’ for Rumby – as he referred to Thomas Rumbold
Wright. Athletic-looking and bearded, courteous and affable, Case wore jeans, Reeboks, and an open-necked checked shirt. No
uniform or peaked cap for this driver, who opened the front door of the Merc so that I should sit next to him companionably,
not behind in splendid isolation. Case radiated the easy negligence of a cultured bodyguard-if-need-be. I was dressed in similar
informal style, being determined not to doll myself up in awe for the grand encounter – though I refused to wear trainers
with designer names on them.
Although Wright maintained a corporate headquarters in Texas, he personally favoured his European bastion, Bexford Hall. This
had recently been extended by the addition of a mini-mock-Tudor castle wing to house his art in even higher security. The
Sunday Times colour supplement had featured photos of this jail of art. (Did it come complete with a dungeon, I wondered?)
The mid-June weather was chilly and blustery – either typical British summer caprice or a Greenhouse spasm, depending on your
ideology.
As we were heading out towards the motorway, we soon passed one of those hoardings featuring a giant poster of Archimboldo’s portrait of Rudolph II as an assembly of fruits, vegetables,
and flowers. Ripe pear nose; flushed round cheeks of peach and apple; cherry and mulberry eyes; spiky chestnut husk of a chin;
corn-ear brows, and so on, and so on.
The Emperor Rudolph as Vertumnus, Roman god of fruit trees, of growth and transformation. Who cared about that particular
snippet of art-historical info? Across the portrait’s chest splashed the Eco message, WE ARE ALL PART OF NATURE. This was part of that massive and highly successful Green propaganda campaign exploiting Archimboldo’s ‘nature-heads’ –
a campaign which absolutely caught the eye in the most persuasive style.
These posters had been adorning Europe and America and wherever else for the best part of two years now. Indeed, they’d become
such a radiant emblem of eco-consciousness, such a part of the mental landscape, that I doubted they would ever disappear from our streets. People even wore miniatures as badges – as though true humanity involved becoming a garlanded
bundle of fruit and veg, with a cauliflower brain, perhaps.
Case slowed and stared at that hoarding.
‘Rudolph the red-nosed,’ I commented.
Somewhat to my surprise, Case replied, ‘Ah, and Rudolph loved Archimboldo’s jokes so much that he made him into a count! Sense
of humour’s sadly missing these days, don’t you think?’
My driver must have been boning up on his art history. The Green poster campaign was certainly accompanied by no background
info about the artist whose images they were ripping off – or perhaps one ought to say ‘recuperating’ for the present day
… rather as an ad agency might exploit the Mona Lisa to promote tampons. (Why is she smiling … ?)
‘Those paintings weren’t just jokes,’ I demurred.
‘No, and neither are those posters.’ Case seemed to loathe those, as though he would like to tear them all down. He speeded
up, and soon we reached the motorway.
Under the driving-mirror – where idiots used to hang woolly dice, and where nowadays people often hung plastic apples or pears, either sincerely or else in an attempt to immunize their vehicles against eco-vandals – there dangled a little model
… of a rather complex-looking space station. The model was made of silver, or was at least silver-plated. It swung to and
fro as we drove. At times, when I glanced that way, I confused rear-view mirror with model so that it appeared as if a gleaming
futuristic craft was pursuing us up the M40, banking and yawing behind us.
Down where my left hand rested I found power-controls for the passenger seat. So I raised the leather throne – yes indeed,
I was sitting on a dead animal’s hide, and no wonder the windows were semi-opaque from outside. I lowered the seat and reclined
it. I extruded and recessed the lumbar support. Now that I’d discovered this box of tricks, I just couldn’t settle on the
most restful position for myself. Supposing the seat had been inflexible, there’d have been no problem. Excessive tech, perhaps?
I felt fidgety.
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ I asked Case.
‘Rumby smokes in this car,’ was his answer, which didn’t quite confide his own personal feelings, unless the implication was
that these were largely irrelevant amongst Wright’s entourage.
Case ignored the sixty-mile-an-hour fuel-efficiency speed limit, though he drove very safely in this cushioned tank of a car.
He always kept an eye open well ahead and well behind as if conscious of possible interception, by a police patrol, or – who
knows? – by Green vigilante kidnappers.
Bexford Hall was in the triangle between Stow-on-the-Wold, Broadway, and Winchcombe, set in a wooded river valley cutting
through the rolling, breezy, sheep-grazed uplands.
The house was invisible from the leafy side-road, being masked by the high, wire-tipped stone boundary wall in good repair,
and then by trees. Case opened wrought iron gates electronically from the car – apparently the head gardener and family lived
in the high-pitched gatehouse alongside – and we purred up a winding drive.
Lawns with topiary hedges fronted the mullion-windowed house. Built of soft golden limestone around a courtyard, Chez Wright somewhat resembled a civilian castle even before his addition of the bastioned, bastard-architectural art wing. A helicopter
stood on a concrete apron. A Porsche, a Jaguar, and various lesser beasts were parked in a row on gravel. A satellite dish
graced the rear slate-tiled roof, from which Tudor chimneys rose.
The sun blinked through, though clouds still scudded.
And so – catching a glimpse en route of several people at computer consoles, scrutinizing what were probably oil prices –
we passed through to John Lascelles’ office, where the casual piles of glossy art books mainly caught my eye.
Having delivered me, Case left to ‘do things’ …
Lascelles was tall, willowy, and melancholy. He favoured dark mauve corduroy trousers and a multi-pocketed purple shirt loaded
with many pens, not to mention a clip-on walkie-talkie. On account of the ecclesiastical hues I imagined him as a sort of
secular court chaplain to Wright. His smile was a pursed, wistful affair, though there was that boyish lilt to his voice which
had misled me on the phone. His silences were the truer self.
He poured coffee for me from a percolator; then he radioed news of my arrival. It seemed that people communicated by personal
radio in the house. In reply he received a crackly splutter of Texan which I hardly caught.
Lascelles sat and scrutinized me while I drank and smoked a cigarette; on his littered desk I’d noted an ashtray with a cheroot
stub crushed in it.
Lascelles steepled his hands. He was cataloguing me: a new person collected – at least potentially – by his non-royal master,
as he himself must once have been collected.
Woman. Thirty-one. Mesomorphic build; though not exactly chunky. Small high breasts. Tight curly brown hair cropped quite
short. Violet vampiric lipstick. Passably callipygian ass.
Then in bustled Rumby - as I simply had to think of the man thereafter.
Rumby was a roly-poly fellow attired in crumpled bronze slacks and a floppy buff shirt with lots of pockets for pens, calculator,
radio. He wore scruffy trainers, though I didn’t suppose that he jogged around his estate. His white complexion said otherwise. His face was quizzically owlish, with large-spectacles – frames of mottled amber – magnifying his eyes into
brown orbs; and his thinning feathery hair was rebellious.
He beamed, almost tangibly projecting energy. He pressed my flesh quickly. He drew me along in his slipstream from Lascelles’ office down a walnut-panelled corridor. We
entered a marble-floored domed hall which housed gleaming spotlit models. Some in perspex cases, others hanging. Not models
of oil-rigs, oh no. Models of a Moon base, of spacecraft, of space stations.
Was Rumby a little boy at heart? Was this his den? Did he play with these toys?
‘What do you think about space?’ he asked me.
Mischief urged me to be contrary, yet I told him the truth.
‘Personally,’ I assured him, ‘I think that if we cop out of space now, as looks highly likely, then we’ll be locked up here
on Mother Earth for ever after eating a diet of beans and being repressively good with “Keep off the Grass” signs everywhere.
Oh dear, we mustn’t mess up Mars by going there the way we messed up Earth! Mess up Mars, for Christ’s sake? It’s dead to start with – a desert of rust. I think if we can grab all those clean resources and free energy in space, we’d be crazy
to hide in our shell instead. But there’s neo-puritanism for you.’
Rumby rubbed his hands. ‘And if Green propaganda loses us our launch window of the next fifty years or so, then we’ve lost
for ever because we’ll have spent all our spunk. I knew you’d be simpatico, Jill. I’ve read Aesthetic Concubines twice.’
‘Concupiscence, actually,’ I reminded him.
‘Let’s call it Concubines. That’s easier to say.’
Already my life and mind were being mutated by Rumby …
‘So how did you extrapolate my views on space from a book on the art market?’ I asked.
He tapped his brow. ‘I picked up on your anti-repressive streak and the perverse way you think. Am I right?’
‘Didn’t you regard my book as a bit, well, rude?’
‘I don’t intend to take things personally when the future of the human race is at stake. It is, you know. It is. Green pressures
are going to nix everyone’s space budget. Do you know they’re pressing to limit the number of rocket launches to a measly
dozen per year world-wide because of the exhaust gases? And all those would have to be Earth-Resources-relevant. Loony-tune environ-mentalists! There’s a religious fervour spreading like clap in a cathouse. It’s screwing the world’s brains.’ How colourfully he phrased things. Was he trying
to throw me off balance? Maybe he was oblivious to other people’s opinions. I gazed blandly at him.
‘Jill,’ he confided, ‘I’m part of a pro-space pressure group of industrialists called the Star Club. We’ve commissioned surveys.
Do you know, in one recent poll forty-five per cent of those questioned said that they’d happily give up quote all the benefits
of “science” if they could live in a more natural world without radioactivity? Can you believe such scuzzbrains? We know how fast this Eco gangrene is spreading. How do we disinfect it? Do we use rational scientific argument? You might as well
reason with a hippo on heat.’
‘Actually, I don’t see how this involves me …’
‘We’ll need to use some tricks. So, come and view the Wright Collection.’
He took me through a security-coded steel door into his climate-controlled sanctum of masterpieces.
Room after room. Rubens. Goya. Titian. And other lesser luminaries …
… till we came to the door of an inner sanctum.
I half expected to find the Mona Lisa herself within. But no …
On an easel sat … a totally pornographic, piscine portrait. A figure made of many fishes (along with a few crustaceans).
A female figure.
A spread-legged naked woman, red lobster dildo clutched in one octopus-hand, frigging herself. A slippery, slithery, lubricious
Venus composed of eels and catfish and trout and a score of other species. Prawn labia, with legs and feelers as pubic hair
… The long suckery fingers of her other octopus-hand teased a pearl nipple …
The painting just had to be by Archimboldo. It was very clever and, mm, persuasive. It also oozed lust and perversity.
‘So how do you like her?’ asked Rumby.
‘That lobster’s rather a nippy notion,’ I said.
‘It isn’t a lobster,’ he corrected me. ‘It’s a cooked freshwater crayfish.’
‘She’s, well, fairly destabilizing if you happen to drool over all those “We are part of Nature” posters.’
‘Right! And Archimboldo painted a dozen such porn portraits for private consumption by crazy Emperor Rudolph.’
‘He did?.’ This was astonishing news.
‘I’ve laid hands on them all, though they aren’t all here.’
Rumby directed me to a table where a portfolio lay. Opening this, I turned over a dozen large glossy colour reproductions
– of masturbating men made of mushrooms and autumnal fruits, men with large hairy nuts and spurting seed; of licking lesbian
ladies composed of marrows and lettuce leaves …
‘You researched all the background bio on Strada, Jill. Nobody knows what sort of things our friend Archy might have been
painting between 1576 and 1587 before he went back home to Milan, hmm?’
‘I thought he was busy arranging festivals for Rudolph. Masques and tournaments and processions.’
‘That isn’t all he was arranging. Rudy was fairly nutty.’
‘Oh, I don’t know if that’s quite fair to Rudolph …’
‘What, to keep a chained lion in the hall? To sleep in a different bed every night? His mania for exotica! Esoterica! Erotica!
A pushover for any passing magician. Bizarre foibles. Loopy as King Ludo of Bavaria – yet with real power. The power to indulge himself – secretly – in orgies and weird erotica, there in vast Ratzen Castle in Prague.’
I wondered about the provenance of these hitherto unknown paintings.
To which, Rumby gave a very plausible answer.
When the Swedes under the command of von Wrangel sacked Prague in 1648 as their contribution to the Thirty Years War, they
pillaged the imperial collections. Thus a sheaf of Archimboldos ended up in Skoklosters Castle at Bålsta in Sweden.
‘Skoklosters Slott. Kind of evocative name, huh?’
When Queen Christina converted to Catholicism in 1654 and abdicated the Swedish throne, she took many of those looted art
treasures with her to Rome itself – with the exception of so-called German art, which she despised. In her eyes, Archimboldo was part of German art.
However, in the view of her catechist (who was a subtle priest), those locked-away porn paintings were a different kettle of fish. The Vatican should take charge of those and keep them sub rosa. Painters were never fingered by the Inquisition, unlike authors of the written word. Bonfires of merely lewd material were
never an issue in an era when clerics often liked a fuck. Nevertheless, such paintings might serve as a handy blackmail tool
against Habsburg Emperors who felt tempted to act too leniently towards Protestants in their domains. A blot on the Habsburg
scutcheon, suggesting a strain of lunacy.
The cardinal-diplomat to whom the paintings were consigned deposited them for safe keeping in the crypt at a certain enclosed
convent of his patronage. There, as it happened, they remained until discovered by a private collector in the 1890s. By then
the convent had fallen on hard times. Our collector relieved the holy mothers of the embarrassing secret heritage in return
for a substantial donation …
‘It’s a watertight story,’ concluded Rumby, blinking owlishly at me. ‘Of course it’s also a complete lie …’
The dirty dozen Archimboldos were forgeries perpetrated in Holland within the past couple of years, to Rumby’s specifications,
by a would-be surrealist.
I stared at the fishy masturbatress, fascinated.
‘They’re fine forgeries,’ he enthused. ‘Painted on antique oak board precisely eleven millimetres thick. Two base layers of
white lead, chalk, and charcoal slack …’He expatiated with the enthusiasm of a petrochemist conducting an assay of crude.
The accuracy of the lipid and protein components. The pigments consisting of azurite, yellow lead, malachite … Mr Oil seemed
to know rather a lot about such aspects of oil painting.
He waved his hand impatiently. ‘Point is, it’ll stand up under X-ray, infra-red, most sorts of analysis. This is perfectionist
forgery with serious money behind it. Oh yes, sponsored exhibition in Europe, book, prints, postcards, media scandal … ! These
naughty Archies are going to fuck all those Green Fascists in the eyeballs. Here’s their patron saint with his pants down. Here’s what red-nosed Rudy really got off on.
Nobody’ll be able to gaze dewy-eyed at those posters any more, drooling about the sanctity of nature. This is nature – red in dildo and labia. A fish-fuck. Their big image campaign will blow up in their faces – ludicrously, obscenely.
Can you beat the power of an image? Why yes, you can – with an anti-image! We’ll have done something really positive to save the space budget. You’ll write the intro to the art
book, Jenny, in your inimitable style. Scholarly – but provocative.’
‘I will?’
‘Yes, because I’ll pay you three-quarters of a million dollars.’
A flea-bite to Rumby, really …
The budget for this whole escapade was probably ten times that. Or more. Would that represent the output of one single oil
well for a year? A month … ? I really had no idea.
Aside from our crusade for space, smearing egg conspicuously on the face of the ecofreaks might materially assist Rumby’s
daily business and prove to be a sound investment, since he profited so handsomely by pumping out the planet’s non-renewable
resources.
‘And because you want to sock Green Fascism, Jill. And on account of how this is so splendidly, provocatively perverse.’
Was he right, or was he right?
He was certainly different from the kind of man I’d expected to meet.
Obviously I mustn’t spill the beans in the near future. Consequently the bulk of my fee would be held on deposit in my name in a Zurich bank, but would only become accessible to me five years
after publication of Archimboldo Erotico …
Until then I would need to lead roughly the same life as usual – plus the need to defend my latest opus amongst my peers and
on TV and in magazines and wherever else. Rumby – or Chaplain Lascelles – would certainly strive to ensure a media circus,
if none such burgeoned of its own accord. I would be Rumby’s front woman.
I liked the three-quarters of a million aspect. This showed that Rumby had subtlety. One million would have been a blatant bribe.
I also liked Rumby himself.
I had indeed been collected.
And that 750K (as Brother Bob would count it) wasn’t by any means the only consideration. I approved.
As to my fallback position, should the scheme be – ahem – rumbled … well, pranks question mundane reality in a revolutionary
manner, don’t they just?
That was a line from Peter, which I ha. . .
Bathed in golden light, this painting shows us a rich connoisseur displaying a nude female statuette which is perhaps eighteen
inches high. Oh yes, full-bearded Signor Strada is prosperous – in his black velvet doublet, his cerise satin shirt, and his
ermine cloak. He holds that voluptuous little Venus well away from an unseen spectator. He gazes at that spectator almost
shiftily. Strada is exposing his Venus to view, yet he’s also withholding her proprietorially so as to whet the appetite.
With her feet supported on his open right hand, and her back resting across his left palm, the sculpted woman likewise leans
away as if in complicity with Strada. How carefully his fingers wrap around her. One finger eclipses a breast. Another teases
her neck. Not that her charms aren’t on display. Her hands are held high, brushing her shoulders. Her big-navelled belly and mons Veneris are on full show. A slight crossing
of her knees hints at a helpless, lascivious reticence.
She arouses the desire to acquire and to handle her, a yearning that is at once an artistic and an erotic passion. Almost,
she seems to be a homunculus – a tiny woman bred within an alchemist’s vessel by the likes of a Paracelsus, who had died only
some twenty-five years previously.
I chose this portrait of Jacopo Strada as the cover for my book, Aesthetic Concupiscence. My first chapter was devoted to an analysis of the implications of this particular painting …
Jacopo Strada was an antiquary who spent many years in the employ of the Habsburg court, first at Vienna and then at Prague,
as Keeper of Antiquities. He procured and catalogued gems and coins as well as classical statuary.
Coins were important to the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors, because coins bore the portraits of monarchs. A collection of coins
was a visible genealogy of God-anointed rulers. Back on Christmas Day in the year 800 the Pope had crowned Charlemagne as
the first ‘Emperor of the Romans’. The Church had decided it no longer quite had the clout to run Europe politically as well
as spiritually. This imperial concoction – at times heroic, at other times hiccuping along – lasted until 1806. That was when
the last Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II, abdicated without successor so as to thwart Napoleon from grabbing the title. By
then, as they say, the Emperor presided over piecemeal acres which were neither an empire, nor Roman, nor holy. Of course,
effectively the Habsburg dynasty had hijacked the title of Emperor, which was supposed to be elective.
History has tended to view the Habsburg court of Rudolph II at Prague in the late 1570s and 80s as wonky, wacky, and weird:
an excellent watering-hole for any passing nut-cases, such as alchemists, hermetic occultists, or astrologers – who of course,
back then, were regarded as ‘scientists’. Not that true science wasn’t well represented, too! Revered astronomer Tycho Brahe burst his bladder with fatal result at Rudolph’s
court, due to that Emperor’s eccentric insistence that no one might be excused from table till his Caesarian Majesty had finished
revelling.
Botanists were very busy classifying plants there, and naturalists were taxonomizing exotic wildlife (of which many specimens
graced Rudolph’s zoo) – just as Strada himself tried to impose order and methodology upon ancient Venuses.
Strada resigned and quit Prague in 1579, perhaps in irritation that his aesthetic criteria held less sway over Rudolph than
those of another adviser on the Imperial art collection – namely Giuseppe Archimboldo …
My troubles began when I received a phone call at Central St Martin’s School of Art in Charing Cross Road, where I lectured
part-time in History of the Same. The caller was one John Lascelles. He introduced himself as the UK personal assistant to
Thomas Rumbold Wright. Oil magnate and art collector, no less. Lascelles’ voice had a youthfully engaging, though slightly
prissy timbre.
Was I the Jill Donaldson who had written Aesthetic Concupiscence? I who had featured scintillatingly on Art Debate at Eight on Channel 4 TV? Mr Wright would very much like to meet me. He had a proposition to make. Might a car be sent for me, to
whisk me the eighty-odd miles from London to the North Cotswolds?
What sort of proposition?
Across my mind there flashed a bizarre image of myself as a diminutive Venus sprawling in this oil billionaire’s acquisitive,
satin-shirted arms. For of course in my book I had cleverly put the stiletto-tipped boot into all such as he, who contributed
to the obscene lunacy of art prices.
Maybe Thomas Rumbold Wright was seeking a peculiar form of recompense for my ego-puncturing stiletto stabs, since he – capricious
bachelor – was certainly mentioned once in my book …
‘What sort of proposition?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ said Lascelles, boyishly protesting innocence.
I waited. However, Lascelles was very good at silences, whereas I am not.
‘Surely you must have some idea, Mr Lascelles?’
‘Mr Wright will tell you, Ms Donaldson.’
Why not? Why not indeed? I had always revelled in paradoxes, and it must be quite paradoxical – not to mention constituting
a delicious piece of field work – for Jill Donaldson to accept an invitation from Thomas R. Wright, lavisher of untold millions
upon old canvases.
One of my prime paradoxes – in my ‘Stratagems of Deceit’ chapter – involved comparison between the consumption of sensual
fine art, and of visual pornography. I perpetrated an iconography of the latter based upon interviews I conducted with ‘glamour’
photographers on the job. No, I didn’t see it as my mission to deconstruct male-oriented sexism. Not a bit of it. That would be banal. I came to praise porn, not
to bury it. Those sumptuous nudes in oils of yore were the buoyant, respectable porn of their day. What we needed nowadays,
I enthused tongue in cheek, several tongues in cheek indeed – were issues of Penthouse magazine entirely painted by latter-day Masters, with tits by the Titians of today, vulvas by Veroneses, pubes by populist
Poussins … Ha!
I was buying a little flat in upper Bloomsbury, with the assistance of Big Brother Robert who was a bank manager in Oxford.
Plump sanctimonious Bob regarded this scrap of property as a good investment. Indeed, but for his support, I could hardly
have coped. Crowded with books and prints, on which I squandered too much, Chez Donaldson was already distinctly cramped.
I could hold a party in it – so long as I only invited a dozen people and we spilled on to the landing.
Even amidst slump and eco-puritanism, London property prices still bore a passing resemblance to Impressionist price-tags.
Perhaps eco-puritanism actually sustained high prices, since it seemed that one ought to be penalized for wishing to live fairly centrally in a city, contributing
to the sewage burden and resources and power demand of megalopolis, and whatnot.
Well, we were definitely into an era of radical repressiveness. The Eco bandwagon was rolling. Was one’s lifestyle environmentally
friendly, third-world friendly, future friendly? The no-smoking, no-car, no-red-meat, no-frilly-knickers, sackcloth-and-ashes
straitjacket was tightening; and while I might have seemed to be on that side ethically as regards the conspicuous squandering
of megamillions on paintings, I simply did not buy the package. Perhaps the fact that I smoked cigarettes – oh penalized sin!
– accounted in part for my antipathy to the Goody-Goodies. Hence my naughtiness in exalting (tongues in cheek) such a symptom
of unreconstructed consciousness as porn. Paradox, paradox. I did like to provoke.
How many lovers had such a tearaway as myself had by the age of thirty-one? Just three, in fact; one of them another woman,
a painting student.
Peter, Annie, and Phil. No one at the moment. I wasn’t exactly outrageous in private life.
Peter had been the prankster, the mercurial one. For his ‘God of the Deep’ exhibition he wired fish skeletons into the contours
of bizarre Gothic cathedrals, which he displayed in tanks of water. Goldfish were the congregations – was this art, or a joke? Several less savoury anarchistic exploits finally disenchanted
me with Peter – about the time I decided definitively that I really was an art historian and a critic (though of capricious
spirit).
Sending a Mercedes, with darkened windows, to collect me could have wiped out my street cred. Personally, I regarded this
as a Happening.
Mind you, I did experience a twinge of doubt – along the lines that maybe I ought to phone someone (Phil? Annie? Definitely
not Peter …) to confide where I was being taken, just in case ‘something happens to me …’ I didn’t do so, yet the spice of supposed danger added a certain frisson.
When my doorbell rang, the radio was bemoaning the death of coral reefs, blanched leprous by the extinction of the symbiotic
algae in them. This was sad, of course, tragic; yet I didn’t intend to scourge myself personally, as the participants in the programme seemed to feel was appropriate.
The driver proved to be a Dutchman called Kees, pronounced Case, who ‘did things’ for Rumby – as he referred to Thomas Rumbold
Wright. Athletic-looking and bearded, courteous and affable, Case wore jeans, Reeboks, and an open-necked checked shirt. No
uniform or peaked cap for this driver, who opened the front door of the Merc so that I should sit next to him companionably,
not behind in splendid isolation. Case radiated the easy negligence of a cultured bodyguard-if-need-be. I was dressed in similar
informal style, being determined not to doll myself up in awe for the grand encounter – though I refused to wear trainers
with designer names on them.
Although Wright maintained a corporate headquarters in Texas, he personally favoured his European bastion, Bexford Hall. This
had recently been extended by the addition of a mini-mock-Tudor castle wing to house his art in even higher security. The
Sunday Times colour supplement had featured photos of this jail of art. (Did it come complete with a dungeon, I wondered?)
The mid-June weather was chilly and blustery – either typical British summer caprice or a Greenhouse spasm, depending on your
ideology.
As we were heading out towards the motorway, we soon passed one of those hoardings featuring a giant poster of Archimboldo’s portrait of Rudolph II as an assembly of fruits, vegetables,
and flowers. Ripe pear nose; flushed round cheeks of peach and apple; cherry and mulberry eyes; spiky chestnut husk of a chin;
corn-ear brows, and so on, and so on.
The Emperor Rudolph as Vertumnus, Roman god of fruit trees, of growth and transformation. Who cared about that particular
snippet of art-historical info? Across the portrait’s chest splashed the Eco message, WE ARE ALL PART OF NATURE. This was part of that massive and highly successful Green propaganda campaign exploiting Archimboldo’s ‘nature-heads’ –
a campaign which absolutely caught the eye in the most persuasive style.
These posters had been adorning Europe and America and wherever else for the best part of two years now. Indeed, they’d become
such a radiant emblem of eco-consciousness, such a part of the mental landscape, that I doubted they would ever disappear from our streets. People even wore miniatures as badges – as though true humanity involved becoming a garlanded
bundle of fruit and veg, with a cauliflower brain, perhaps.
Case slowed and stared at that hoarding.
‘Rudolph the red-nosed,’ I commented.
Somewhat to my surprise, Case replied, ‘Ah, and Rudolph loved Archimboldo’s jokes so much that he made him into a count! Sense
of humour’s sadly missing these days, don’t you think?’
My driver must have been boning up on his art history. The Green poster campaign was certainly accompanied by no background
info about the artist whose images they were ripping off – or perhaps one ought to say ‘recuperating’ for the present day
… rather as an ad agency might exploit the Mona Lisa to promote tampons. (Why is she smiling … ?)
‘Those paintings weren’t just jokes,’ I demurred.
‘No, and neither are those posters.’ Case seemed to loathe those, as though he would like to tear them all down. He speeded
up, and soon we reached the motorway.
Under the driving-mirror – where idiots used to hang woolly dice, and where nowadays people often hung plastic apples or pears, either sincerely or else in an attempt to immunize their vehicles against eco-vandals – there dangled a little model
… of a rather complex-looking space station. The model was made of silver, or was at least silver-plated. It swung to and
fro as we drove. At times, when I glanced that way, I confused rear-view mirror with model so that it appeared as if a gleaming
futuristic craft was pursuing us up the M40, banking and yawing behind us.
Down where my left hand rested I found power-controls for the passenger seat. So I raised the leather throne – yes indeed,
I was sitting on a dead animal’s hide, and no wonder the windows were semi-opaque from outside. I lowered the seat and reclined
it. I extruded and recessed the lumbar support. Now that I’d discovered this box of tricks, I just couldn’t settle on the
most restful position for myself. Supposing the seat had been inflexible, there’d have been no problem. Excessive tech, perhaps?
I felt fidgety.
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ I asked Case.
‘Rumby smokes in this car,’ was his answer, which didn’t quite confide his own personal feelings, unless the implication was
that these were largely irrelevant amongst Wright’s entourage.
Case ignored the sixty-mile-an-hour fuel-efficiency speed limit, though he drove very safely in this cushioned tank of a car.
He always kept an eye open well ahead and well behind as if conscious of possible interception, by a police patrol, or – who
knows? – by Green vigilante kidnappers.
Bexford Hall was in the triangle between Stow-on-the-Wold, Broadway, and Winchcombe, set in a wooded river valley cutting
through the rolling, breezy, sheep-grazed uplands.
The house was invisible from the leafy side-road, being masked by the high, wire-tipped stone boundary wall in good repair,
and then by trees. Case opened wrought iron gates electronically from the car – apparently the head gardener and family lived
in the high-pitched gatehouse alongside – and we purred up a winding drive.
Lawns with topiary hedges fronted the mullion-windowed house. Built of soft golden limestone around a courtyard, Chez Wright somewhat resembled a civilian castle even before his addition of the bastioned, bastard-architectural art wing. A helicopter
stood on a concrete apron. A Porsche, a Jaguar, and various lesser beasts were parked in a row on gravel. A satellite dish
graced the rear slate-tiled roof, from which Tudor chimneys rose.
The sun blinked through, though clouds still scudded.
And so – catching a glimpse en route of several people at computer consoles, scrutinizing what were probably oil prices –
we passed through to John Lascelles’ office, where the casual piles of glossy art books mainly caught my eye.
Having delivered me, Case left to ‘do things’ …
Lascelles was tall, willowy, and melancholy. He favoured dark mauve corduroy trousers and a multi-pocketed purple shirt loaded
with many pens, not to mention a clip-on walkie-talkie. On account of the ecclesiastical hues I imagined him as a sort of
secular court chaplain to Wright. His smile was a pursed, wistful affair, though there was that boyish lilt to his voice which
had misled me on the phone. His silences were the truer self.
He poured coffee for me from a percolator; then he radioed news of my arrival. It seemed that people communicated by personal
radio in the house. In reply he received a crackly splutter of Texan which I hardly caught.
Lascelles sat and scrutinized me while I drank and smoked a cigarette; on his littered desk I’d noted an ashtray with a cheroot
stub crushed in it.
Lascelles steepled his hands. He was cataloguing me: a new person collected – at least potentially – by his non-royal master,
as he himself must once have been collected.
Woman. Thirty-one. Mesomorphic build; though not exactly chunky. Small high breasts. Tight curly brown hair cropped quite
short. Violet vampiric lipstick. Passably callipygian ass.
Then in bustled Rumby - as I simply had to think of the man thereafter.
Rumby was a roly-poly fellow attired in crumpled bronze slacks and a floppy buff shirt with lots of pockets for pens, calculator,
radio. He wore scruffy trainers, though I didn’t suppose that he jogged around his estate. His white complexion said otherwise. His face was quizzically owlish, with large-spectacles – frames of mottled amber – magnifying his eyes into
brown orbs; and his thinning feathery hair was rebellious.
He beamed, almost tangibly projecting energy. He pressed my flesh quickly. He drew me along in his slipstream from Lascelles’ office down a walnut-panelled corridor. We
entered a marble-floored domed hall which housed gleaming spotlit models. Some in perspex cases, others hanging. Not models
of oil-rigs, oh no. Models of a Moon base, of spacecraft, of space stations.
Was Rumby a little boy at heart? Was this his den? Did he play with these toys?
‘What do you think about space?’ he asked me.
Mischief urged me to be contrary, yet I told him the truth.
‘Personally,’ I assured him, ‘I think that if we cop out of space now, as looks highly likely, then we’ll be locked up here
on Mother Earth for ever after eating a diet of beans and being repressively good with “Keep off the Grass” signs everywhere.
Oh dear, we mustn’t mess up Mars by going there the way we messed up Earth! Mess up Mars, for Christ’s sake? It’s dead to start with – a desert of rust. I think if we can grab all those clean resources and free energy in space, we’d be crazy
to hide in our shell instead. But there’s neo-puritanism for you.’
Rumby rubbed his hands. ‘And if Green propaganda loses us our launch window of the next fifty years or so, then we’ve lost
for ever because we’ll have spent all our spunk. I knew you’d be simpatico, Jill. I’ve read Aesthetic Concubines twice.’
‘Concupiscence, actually,’ I reminded him.
‘Let’s call it Concubines. That’s easier to say.’
Already my life and mind were being mutated by Rumby …
‘So how did you extrapolate my views on space from a book on the art market?’ I asked.
He tapped his brow. ‘I picked up on your anti-repressive streak and the perverse way you think. Am I right?’
‘Didn’t you regard my book as a bit, well, rude?’
‘I don’t intend to take things personally when the future of the human race is at stake. It is, you know. It is. Green pressures
are going to nix everyone’s space budget. Do you know they’re pressing to limit the number of rocket launches to a measly
dozen per year world-wide because of the exhaust gases? And all those would have to be Earth-Resources-relevant. Loony-tune environ-mentalists! There’s a religious fervour spreading like clap in a cathouse. It’s screwing the world’s brains.’ How colourfully he phrased things. Was he trying
to throw me off balance? Maybe he was oblivious to other people’s opinions. I gazed blandly at him.
‘Jill,’ he confided, ‘I’m part of a pro-space pressure group of industrialists called the Star Club. We’ve commissioned surveys.
Do you know, in one recent poll forty-five per cent of those questioned said that they’d happily give up quote all the benefits
of “science” if they could live in a more natural world without radioactivity? Can you believe such scuzzbrains? We know how fast this Eco gangrene is spreading. How do we disinfect it? Do we use rational scientific argument? You might as well
reason with a hippo on heat.’
‘Actually, I don’t see how this involves me …’
‘We’ll need to use some tricks. So, come and view the Wright Collection.’
He took me through a security-coded steel door into his climate-controlled sanctum of masterpieces.
Room after room. Rubens. Goya. Titian. And other lesser luminaries …
… till we came to the door of an inner sanctum.
I half expected to find the Mona Lisa herself within. But no …
On an easel sat … a totally pornographic, piscine portrait. A figure made of many fishes (along with a few crustaceans).
A female figure.
A spread-legged naked woman, red lobster dildo clutched in one octopus-hand, frigging herself. A slippery, slithery, lubricious
Venus composed of eels and catfish and trout and a score of other species. Prawn labia, with legs and feelers as pubic hair
… The long suckery fingers of her other octopus-hand teased a pearl nipple …
The painting just had to be by Archimboldo. It was very clever and, mm, persuasive. It also oozed lust and perversity.
‘So how do you like her?’ asked Rumby.
‘That lobster’s rather a nippy notion,’ I said.
‘It isn’t a lobster,’ he corrected me. ‘It’s a cooked freshwater crayfish.’
‘She’s, well, fairly destabilizing if you happen to drool over all those “We are part of Nature” posters.’
‘Right! And Archimboldo painted a dozen such porn portraits for private consumption by crazy Emperor Rudolph.’
‘He did?.’ This was astonishing news.
‘I’ve laid hands on them all, though they aren’t all here.’
Rumby directed me to a table where a portfolio lay. Opening this, I turned over a dozen large glossy colour reproductions
– of masturbating men made of mushrooms and autumnal fruits, men with large hairy nuts and spurting seed; of licking lesbian
ladies composed of marrows and lettuce leaves …
‘You researched all the background bio on Strada, Jill. Nobody knows what sort of things our friend Archy might have been
painting between 1576 and 1587 before he went back home to Milan, hmm?’
‘I thought he was busy arranging festivals for Rudolph. Masques and tournaments and processions.’
‘That isn’t all he was arranging. Rudy was fairly nutty.’
‘Oh, I don’t know if that’s quite fair to Rudolph …’
‘What, to keep a chained lion in the hall? To sleep in a different bed every night? His mania for exotica! Esoterica! Erotica!
A pushover for any passing magician. Bizarre foibles. Loopy as King Ludo of Bavaria – yet with real power. The power to indulge himself – secretly – in orgies and weird erotica, there in vast Ratzen Castle in Prague.’
I wondered about the provenance of these hitherto unknown paintings.
To which, Rumby gave a very plausible answer.
When the Swedes under the command of von Wrangel sacked Prague in 1648 as their contribution to the Thirty Years War, they
pillaged the imperial collections. Thus a sheaf of Archimboldos ended up in Skoklosters Castle at Bålsta in Sweden.
‘Skoklosters Slott. Kind of evocative name, huh?’
When Queen Christina converted to Catholicism in 1654 and abdicated the Swedish throne, she took many of those looted art
treasures with her to Rome itself – with the exception of so-called German art, which she despised. In her eyes, Archimboldo was part of German art.
However, in the view of her catechist (who was a subtle priest), those locked-away porn paintings were a different kettle of fish. The Vatican should take charge of those and keep them sub rosa. Painters were never fingered by the Inquisition, unlike authors of the written word. Bonfires of merely lewd material were
never an issue in an era when clerics often liked a fuck. Nevertheless, such paintings might serve as a handy blackmail tool
against Habsburg Emperors who felt tempted to act too leniently towards Protestants in their domains. A blot on the Habsburg
scutcheon, suggesting a strain of lunacy.
The cardinal-diplomat to whom the paintings were consigned deposited them for safe keeping in the crypt at a certain enclosed
convent of his patronage. There, as it happened, they remained until discovered by a private collector in the 1890s. By then
the convent had fallen on hard times. Our collector relieved the holy mothers of the embarrassing secret heritage in return
for a substantial donation …
‘It’s a watertight story,’ concluded Rumby, blinking owlishly at me. ‘Of course it’s also a complete lie …’
The dirty dozen Archimboldos were forgeries perpetrated in Holland within the past couple of years, to Rumby’s specifications,
by a would-be surrealist.
I stared at the fishy masturbatress, fascinated.
‘They’re fine forgeries,’ he enthused. ‘Painted on antique oak board precisely eleven millimetres thick. Two base layers of
white lead, chalk, and charcoal slack …’He expatiated with the enthusiasm of a petrochemist conducting an assay of crude.
The accuracy of the lipid and protein components. The pigments consisting of azurite, yellow lead, malachite … Mr Oil seemed
to know rather a lot about such aspects of oil painting.
He waved his hand impatiently. ‘Point is, it’ll stand up under X-ray, infra-red, most sorts of analysis. This is perfectionist
forgery with serious money behind it. Oh yes, sponsored exhibition in Europe, book, prints, postcards, media scandal … ! These
naughty Archies are going to fuck all those Green Fascists in the eyeballs. Here’s their patron saint with his pants down. Here’s what red-nosed Rudy really got off on.
Nobody’ll be able to gaze dewy-eyed at those posters any more, drooling about the sanctity of nature. This is nature – red in dildo and labia. A fish-fuck. Their big image campaign will blow up in their faces – ludicrously, obscenely.
Can you beat the power of an image? Why yes, you can – with an anti-image! We’ll have done something really positive to save the space budget. You’ll write the intro to the art
book, Jenny, in your inimitable style. Scholarly – but provocative.’
‘I will?’
‘Yes, because I’ll pay you three-quarters of a million dollars.’
A flea-bite to Rumby, really …
The budget for this whole escapade was probably ten times that. Or more. Would that represent the output of one single oil
well for a year? A month … ? I really had no idea.
Aside from our crusade for space, smearing egg conspicuously on the face of the ecofreaks might materially assist Rumby’s
daily business and prove to be a sound investment, since he profited so handsomely by pumping out the planet’s non-renewable
resources.
‘And because you want to sock Green Fascism, Jill. And on account of how this is so splendidly, provocatively perverse.’
Was he right, or was he right?
He was certainly different from the kind of man I’d expected to meet.
Obviously I mustn’t spill the beans in the near future. Consequently the bulk of my fee would be held on deposit in my name in a Zurich bank, but would only become accessible to me five years
after publication of Archimboldo Erotico …
Until then I would need to lead roughly the same life as usual – plus the need to defend my latest opus amongst my peers and
on TV and in magazines and wherever else. Rumby – or Chaplain Lascelles – would certainly strive to ensure a media circus,
if none such burgeoned of its own accord. I would be Rumby’s front woman.
I liked the three-quarters of a million aspect. This showed that Rumby had subtlety. One million would have been a blatant bribe.
I also liked Rumby himself.
I had indeed been collected.
And that 750K (as Brother Bob would count it) wasn’t by any means the only consideration. I approved.
As to my fallback position, should the scheme be – ahem – rumbled … well, pranks question mundane reality in a revolutionary
manner, don’t they just?
That was a line from Peter, which I ha. . .
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The Coming of Vertumnus: And Other Stories
Ian Watson
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