What can a hedonistic and surly sceptic do
in the country of sacred art? How can he
escape the notion that these games of
volume, these vividly coloured
layouts, represent all he doesn’t
believe in: fanaticism, eternalife,
the sacrifice of the body? He prowls
the rooms like a famished dog,
desperate for a field of beans, and can’t
find in such exotic and senile mythology
firm enough flesh in which to sink his thoughts.
Annoyed, he speeds up, more and more
impervious to the seraphic beauty
of the breeding madonnas, their patronising
smiles, to the never ending parade
of agonies, ascensions and pietas,
and he desperately searches for Bronzino’s
belles dames, the sweet Venuses or even
the hard faces (but human, at least)
of burghers, mercenaries and noblemen:
messengers of the real, of the violence
of desire masked as lordliness.
On the way out he is stared at by the drunken
smile of a futureless rogue,
by the starving eyes of a fifteen stone
Maggie, by two shards in search
of essential glue. And he promises
to St. Vermeer to undertake very soon
an expiatory pilgrimage to the terrain,
the liberal and levelled new world
of Dutch seventeenth-century painting.