was at the far end of the room. The crowd kept surging forward and Lucca and I were carried with it. I couldn’t see much over the hats of the gents ahead, but I could see the top of a heavy gold frame stretching across the whole of the back wall. About fifteen foot up it was, and perhaps twenty foot long.
As we got closer I began to see splashes of colour and I made out shapes through the gaps between the heads – an arm here, a leg there, a pair of naked buttocks – no wonder they didn’t want women in here with them. From what I could see, and admittedly that wasn’t much so far, The Cinnabar Girls was highly incidental.
As we got closer to the painting the crowd was funnelled into a zig-zag pathway marked out with red velvet ropes. Another warder with white gloves and even more gold buttons than the man in the hall downstairs herded us in.
A note attached to the entrance of this final approach informed us that this was to ‘ enable our patrons to appreciate The Cinnabar Girls in the most favourable circumstances and to protect the work itself, the composition of which is so freshly completed that in certain sections the paint is yet to dry ’ .
We moved even slower now. It seemed likely that around twenty or so ‘patrons’ at a time got a front-row view and after a couple of minutes of artistic ‘appreciation’ they was moved on and out through a door to the left.
After ten more minutes shuffling behind the ropes, it was our turn. Lucca and I filed forward to take up our ‘favourable’ positions and then I looked up.
*
The word ‘evil’ is a powerful one, isn’t it? It’s much stronger than ‘wicked’, which, to my mind, has a sort of larky charm and might come with a wink and a slap on the wrist. No, ‘evil’ suggests something dark, something wrong, something rotten, something sinful.
The Cinnabar Girls was evil. No other word would do.
It was the work of a devil, and as I looked at it, the clever insulting comments and laughter I’d been planning to share with Lucca died inside me.
The first thing to say is that the painting was huge. It stretched the whole length of the wall and was held within a thick carved frame. Even the gilded fruits and vines that coiled about the scene seemed to have a horrible, over-ripe liveliness to them.
The carved branches dipped and curled so that occasionally they drooped from the frame into the scene, partially blocking the distant stormy landscape that rolled beyond the arches of the ancient red stone marketplace where the Cinnabar Girls – all six of them – were displayed.
The sky was alive. A shimmering, sickly silver-yellow, it seemed to have deepness to it like a pool of water. You almost felt you could put your hand through it – although you probably wouldn’t want to for fear of the lightning about to strike out.
Now, this was the clever thing – if you can use that word about something so twisted – along the front of the picture the artist had painted the backs of what I took to be the market ‘buyers’ – a row of men all dressed up in Roman gear like the pictures in Lucca’s books. They were craning for a better view, the muscles in their backs and necks shown tight and sharp. They were straining to see those girls – and we were too.
I flinched as I looked up at them and I felt a trickle of sweat running down my back. And it wasn’t because it was hot in there – that gallery was cold as a nun’s tit, as Nanny Peck would have said.
No, it was because every poor half-naked girl was trussed up in some impossible, peculiar position. Limbs were tied back or staked out where they couldn’t possibly rest in a natural way.
It was an odd thing, but those contorted bodies were displayed, you might say arranged, to show the maximum amount of flesh and the minimum amount of person. It’s difficult to describe exactly what I mean, but those girls were meat – like you might see hanging up at Smithfield of a morning.
It was as if
As we got closer I began to see splashes of colour and I made out shapes through the gaps between the heads – an arm here, a leg there, a pair of naked buttocks – no wonder they didn’t want women in here with them. From what I could see, and admittedly that wasn’t much so far, The Cinnabar Girls was highly incidental.
As we got closer to the painting the crowd was funnelled into a zig-zag pathway marked out with red velvet ropes. Another warder with white gloves and even more gold buttons than the man in the hall downstairs herded us in.
A note attached to the entrance of this final approach informed us that this was to ‘ enable our patrons to appreciate The Cinnabar Girls in the most favourable circumstances and to protect the work itself, the composition of which is so freshly completed that in certain sections the paint is yet to dry ’ .
We moved even slower now. It seemed likely that around twenty or so ‘patrons’ at a time got a front-row view and after a couple of minutes of artistic ‘appreciation’ they was moved on and out through a door to the left.
After ten more minutes shuffling behind the ropes, it was our turn. Lucca and I filed forward to take up our ‘favourable’ positions and then I looked up.
*
The word ‘evil’ is a powerful one, isn’t it? It’s much stronger than ‘wicked’, which, to my mind, has a sort of larky charm and might come with a wink and a slap on the wrist. No, ‘evil’ suggests something dark, something wrong, something rotten, something sinful.
The Cinnabar Girls was evil. No other word would do.
It was the work of a devil, and as I looked at it, the clever insulting comments and laughter I’d been planning to share with Lucca died inside me.
The first thing to say is that the painting was huge. It stretched the whole length of the wall and was held within a thick carved frame. Even the gilded fruits and vines that coiled about the scene seemed to have a horrible, over-ripe liveliness to them.
The carved branches dipped and curled so that occasionally they drooped from the frame into the scene, partially blocking the distant stormy landscape that rolled beyond the arches of the ancient red stone marketplace where the Cinnabar Girls – all six of them – were displayed.
The sky was alive. A shimmering, sickly silver-yellow, it seemed to have deepness to it like a pool of water. You almost felt you could put your hand through it – although you probably wouldn’t want to for fear of the lightning about to strike out.
Now, this was the clever thing – if you can use that word about something so twisted – along the front of the picture the artist had painted the backs of what I took to be the market ‘buyers’ – a row of men all dressed up in Roman gear like the pictures in Lucca’s books. They were craning for a better view, the muscles in their backs and necks shown tight and sharp. They were straining to see those girls – and we were too.
I flinched as I looked up at them and I felt a trickle of sweat running down my back. And it wasn’t because it was hot in there – that gallery was cold as a nun’s tit, as Nanny Peck would have said.
No, it was because every poor half-naked girl was trussed up in some impossible, peculiar position. Limbs were tied back or staked out where they couldn’t possibly rest in a natural way.
It was an odd thing, but those contorted bodies were displayed, you might say arranged, to show the maximum amount of flesh and the minimum amount of person. It’s difficult to describe exactly what I mean, but those girls were meat – like you might see hanging up at Smithfield of a morning.
It was as if
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