THE REFLECTION OF THE VENUS IN THE MIRROR

To Gabriele Finaldi, director of the National Gallery

Serenely provocative, sensual and beautiful, the Venus in the Mirror is more than a myth moved by the magic of Velázquez, imbued with its own transhumant history as a work of art, a thousand times moved by the hands of the servants of restless owners, ambitious, powerful, always powerful, framed in almost unconfessable gluttonies, in compulsive egomania framed in palaces of dubious rococo tastes but full of punctual splendidities, driven in hours of clocks for lives without time, lost in labyrinthine secret rooms, among pompous luxuries and sultry lusts, excessive sumptuousness and comforts unbecoming of rational lives, which should be exemplary and which were the pasture of their own flames, of their carnal appetites, of their sins confessed to ecclesiastical accomplices, in a sort of transgression of values, all in times of rancid customs, abusive conquests, privileges, slavery and mistreatment, disguised or not, all repeated, imitated, prolonged and unjustifiable absurdities. Of course, there were exceptions, and even Santos.

Under the balconies, waiting for bread or substitute cakes – apparently proposed by Marie Antoinette – the plebs resisted, hungry for food but also for privileges, waiting for the miracle of reconversion, of occasional access to the VIP, even if it was through the service door. The human yearning for the good life up to the guillotine. And so in Versailles, in front of the house of the Spanish aristocracy, under the windows of Godoy’s palaces -full of dressed or undressed majas-, or in the Austro-Hungarian court -more serious with Maria Theresa than with Sissi, empress of film-. Current boato for Hola, imitation for the Sálvame de los correveidiles, it was already so for the Madrid’s mentideros of the Siglo de Oro and, in more recent times, it is even so for the post Corazón Telediarios. The Marichalars downhill on a scooter. Realistic, attentive and serious Felipe VI and Leticia. Timely, educated and avant-garde Leonor -it should be written with an “h” in between- and Sofía.

The people bought El Caso, the crimson red headboard as an alternative to the decaffeinated blue of the shirts and the descendants of the veins of obtuse nobility, already replaced in the Forbes list by the Ortegas and noted in the list of debtors of the Treasury and in the notebooks of Serrano and Goya’s corner. The change began in the French Revolution, continued in Paris in 1968, and in 1978, others say in 1982, in Spain, and so it will continue, amnestying the rancid new political aristocracy of the 3%, at the will of ideological needs, not necessarily scatological, divided into factions in the Congress, associated in the offices of influence, refugees behind the revolving doors, in flocks in the hunts. Everything seems to be decomposing.

Revolutions have lost the warmth of popular truth, they have become attached to decrepit ideologies, entangled in anonymous calls, forgotten romantic spontaneous barricades, carnations and cobblestones. Now pure garbage is thrown in the form of mobile messages, variable, inconsistent, devalued the minute after being emitted by the greatest ingenuity of any anonymous creator of trifles. Nothing lasts beyond the instant of creativity itself, nothing comparable to centuries of validity, of moral and ethical resistance, of the classics or artistic icons, example of the cultured civilization caused by centuries and even millennia of education and slow, reflexive evolution, in the open air, in the Piraeus, or in those unique, priceless spaces called cabinets of curiosities, academies, colleges, universities, museums…

A few hammer blows are not enough to put an end to the Venus of the Mirror. A few seconds are enough to know the reflections of a world that suffers from polycrisis, that kidnaps and kills innocents, that allows mafias and drug trafficking, that encourages war, that does not prohibit weapons, that witnesses massacres in schools, that suffers from terrorism or religious fanaticism. We cannot be blinded by so many glare of inhumanity, before so many Dantesque scenes, we can respect the discrepancies and the legal demonstrations, the strikes, of course, but we must preserve images as beautiful and apparently as simple as that of a lady capable of admiring her reflection, perhaps turning our backs more than a provocation is a premonition and a protest. That’s what we sense.

Alberto Barciela, Spanish journalist, is Vice President of EditoRed.

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