Take a break while reading this article. Forget the rampaging mob, the Senate debates, those simulations of dwarf men clad in the virile toga, the decreed artificial paradises, public education, health care queues, strikes by workers, judges, and lawyers. Feel comfortable in this column that seeks an inner exile. Leave behind Ukraine, the drought, the shopping list, Doñana and the parties who promise mathematical formulas to blame the neighbor for the bills not coming out. During these five minutes of reading, we live in an idyllic landscape, in the existence of balanced colors, from five hundred years ago. Tones that are familiar to us and from which we flee because the rhythm of obligations dictates that they are not useful. As if despising beauty were a modern luxury, and not the plague left behind by the mediocrity of our time. Life shouldn’t be far from a Titian painting. It’s the Venetian beauty I cling to when the day is cloudy. I mean those rural paintings. A naked, unassuming Venus, clumsily covering her underbelly with one hand, while extending her body with the other, which is the measure of perfection, yesterday and now. That woman who does not exist and who represents the ecstasy of the senses, the well-being of the gaze, who, despite the centuries, defeats the censorship of the popes, that of the enlightened people, who saw fairy tales for children in these goddesses, and that of the new priests, shocked by objectifying women. It’s not an object, it’s art. And art, however much Baudelaire writes about it, is not transitory. You will now understand that I am talking, for example, about the Venus del Pardo, a painting that Felipe II paid for, but which, through all kinds of entanglements, diplomatic wars and auctions, ended up in the hands of Cardinal Mazarin, and is therefore in a room. for for painting there are few museums as badly organized as those in Paris. We should all, at least once a day, sit and observe our Venus. In the Prado, there are, almost in multitude, also by Titian and his followers, as if the corridors are really Venetian canals through which art history plays out live. The paintings are not fossils. Like books, every look, every reading brings new life to the characters, to the color of the goddess’s skin, to the blue of the sky. For some, that harmony of bodies in fullness means comfort. Others long to caress the sheet that falls from the skin of Venus. The goddess is the measure of our dreams, the distance we set from our mediocrity, from our limits. It’s something that transcends the brush. You know very well that we do not live in a world of fauns, nor of wondrous creatures. The landscape of our reality lacks vegetation, rivers passing calmly, foaming banks, with animals drinking from the streams, always overflowing. We miss country life in our cities, those trees that betray the forest, a grassy meadow dotted with aromatic herbs. Cupids fly over the branches, playful, carefree, learning the relativity of things, the details of daily obligations. Titian, who could have painted an angry god, Jupiter disguised as a ruler with his false promises, decides to disguise him as a satyr, reducing him to a lesser god, a small wild animal who only thinks about enjoying life, knowing nothing of nature obligation to live Therefore he is not afraid of death. Neither Jupiter nor the faun nor us when we fell into ecstasy with the painting. I regret this parenthesis which I offer you, reader. To you, who perhaps expected from me a sensible analysis of reality, and not an aesthetic flight to other worlds. However, it is the present that forces me to go to a secondary room in the Louvre and worship the sleeping goddess, sensual as our tomorrow, when we don’t think about today. A day in which we despise Venus. Even if we run out of gods to worship. No angry deities. But entities full of beauty and who speak through art. I am sorry to speak to you again this Sunday of Venetian beauty, of the wet light that slides over the painting, until it falls on this column, today a little crooked, battered, almost dejected, but that has found salvation at the last moment thanks to the fact that there is still beauty in the world. You just have to look for them and sit in front of them. Even if it’s five minutes a day.
Source: La Verdad
I am George Kunkel, an author working for Today Times Live. I specialize in opinion pieces and cover stories that are both informative and thought-provoking – helping to shape public discourse on key issues. My work is regularly featured across the network’s many platforms, including print media and social media.
