Read Online The Savage Garden by Mark Mills - Free Book Online Page B

don't know about the others," said Antonella as they circled beneath Flora, "but for me she is alive."
        Her look challenged him to contest the assertion. When he didn't, she added, "Touch her leg."
        He wished she hadn't said it. He also wished she hadn't reached out and run her hand up the back of the marble calf from the heel to the crook of the knee, because it left him no choice but to follow suit.
        He tried to experience something—he
wanted
to experience something—and he did.
        "What do you feel?" asked Antonella.
        "I feel," he replied, "like a sweaty Englishman molesting a naked statue in the presence of a complete stranger."
        Antonella gave a sudden loud laugh, her hand shooting to her mouth.
        "I'm sorry," she said. "Maybe you will see her differently with time."
        "Maybe."
        "Go on, please."
        "Really?"
        "I come here every day if I can."
        It wasn't surprising, he continued, that the statue of Flora had been modeled on Venus, given the close link between the two goddesses. Both were associated with fertility and the season of spring. Indeed, it was quite possible that the goddess of love and the goddess of flowers appeared alongside each other in two of the most celebrated paintings to come out of the Renaissance: Sandro Botticelli's
Primavera
and his
Birth of Venus.
        "Really?"
        "It's a new theory, very new."
        "Ah," said Antonella skeptically.
        "You're right, it's probably nothing." He shrugged, knowing full well that it wasn't, not for her, not if she visited the garden as often as she claimed to.
        "Tell me anyway."
        There was no need to explain Flora's story; it was in the file, which she had surely read. Her great-grandfather had even included the Latin lines from Ovid's
Fasti
detailing how the nymph Chloris was pursued by Zephyrus, the west wind, who then violated her, atoning for this act by making her his wife and transforming her into Flora, mistress of all the flowers.
        No one disputed that Zephyrus and Chloris figured in
        Botticelli's
Primavera,
but until now scholars had always read the figure standing to the left of them as the Hora—the spirit—of springtime, scattering flowers. Hence the name of the painting.
        "But what if she's really Flora?" he asked.
        "After her transformation?"
        "Exactly."
        "I don't know. What if it is her?"
        The painting could then be read as an allegory for the nature of love. By pairing Flora—a product of lust, of Zephyrus's passion— with the chaste figure of Venus, then maybe Botticelli was saying that true love is the union of both: passion tempered with chastity.
        It was possible to read the same buried message in the
Birth of Venus.
Zephyrus and Chloris were again present, suggesting that the female figure standing on the shore, holding out the cloak for Venus, might well be Flora.
        "And Venus again represents chastity?"
        "Exactly. Venus Pudica."
        She smiled when he adopted the well-known pose of Venus in her shell, modestly covering her nakedness.
        "It's a good theory," she said.
        "You think?"
        "Yes. Because if it's right, then Flora is a symbol for the erotic, the sexual."
        "Yes, I suppose she is."
        Antonella turned her gaze on Flora. "Do you see it now?"
        He looked up at the statue.
        "See the way she stands—her hips are turned away, but they are also . . . open, inviting. Her arm covers her breasts, but only just, like she doesn't care too much. And her face, the eyes, the mouth. She is not
una innocente."
        He could see what Antonella was driving at. Maybe he was wrong to have attributed the slight slackness of the pose to the inferior hand of a secondary sculptor. Maybe that sculptor hadn't been striving for delicacy and poise, but for something looser, more sensual. No, that