i choose the goat man (on fauns + florence)

Aquatint is the part of printmaking that does tone. We'll get to the goats soon - indulge me.

Etching gives you line, but line cannot give you dusk, or weight, or a soft field of dark sitting behind a figure. For tone you dust the plate with powdered rosin, heat it until each grain melts and grips, and let the acid bite the copper around it. Thousands of small pits, and the pits carry ink the way a wash carries water. It was famously mastered by Goya in the late 18th century and I have been slightly obsessed with it for a few days. Which means I now consider myself somewhat of an authority. Precocious cunt.

There is a variant called sugar-lift, which is the loveliest thing in printmaking. You paint the bare plate with a solution of sugar and ink, using a brush, positively, the way you naturally paint a thing if painting things is your thing. Then you varnish the whole plate over the top and lower it into warm water. The sugar swells and lifts, taking the varnish with it, and the copper is left bare exactly where your brush went. Then you aquatint that and bite it.

The mark you make is the mark that prints. Nothing else in etching works that way.

Reading up on aquatint and seeing a recent exhibit of Miro's work, is how I came to a sugar-lift Picasso made in June 1936, "Faune dévoilant une dormeuse" Picasso subtitled it Jupiter et Antiope, d'après Rembrandt. Dated 12 June 1936.

Sugar-lift aquatint with burin and scraper, from the Vollard Suite. I was transfixed. Fauns... who knew.

So now I've got a thing for a Faun, and I'm down a rabbit hole so deep that I ended up here with aquatint and fauns and rakes and pirates and Debussy and Nijinsky, and Florence + The Machine, which is to say, this is about love. And fauns. So much of fauns. But back to Picasso for now.

"and Love was not what I thought it was..."

The piece in question shows a faun kneeling at the side of a bed, lifting a sheet away from a sleeping woman. He is horned and hairy and about fifty. Both hands are working, one on the sheet and one resting against her. He is not grinning or laviscious. Behind him there is a summer night, a ledge with some plants on it, (I later read that this may have been the herb basil which is significant in Italian folklore... I am in a very deep rabbit hole by now) a great deal of black.

He is being very careful. What?

She is asleep. Properly asleep, on her back, her face turned, entirely gone.

"It crept up on me despite myself"

Nothing in the picture depicts movement or force. The softness in it is Picasso's own hand, kept, because the brush he painted the plate with is the brush you are looking at.

Hang on, there's a Rembrandt as well. The Rembrandt is a small dark etching from 1659. Before that, Van Dyck. Before that, Correggio in the 1520s, whose satyr (we'll get to the difference between satyrs and fauns in a bit.. jesus stop rushing me) surprised me by being young and curly-haired and half smiling, with the goat legs almost an afterthought underneath him. Watteau paints it around 1714 as an oval overdoor, so intimate and so soft that it is often catalogued simply as The Satyr and the Sleeping Nymph, and by then Jupiter has vanished from the title altogether. David paints it. And Titian, the Pardo Venus, painted across the second quarter of the sixteenth century and now in the Louvre. The largest mythological canvas he ever made, close to four metres wide, sent to Philip II of Spain. Landscape, hunters, dogs, a whole world going on, and down in the corner a woman asleep and a satyr lifting the white cloth off her. Titian himself referred to it as the landscape.

Manet copied the Titian in 1856, aged twenty-four, in oil, and the canvas is now in the Musée Marmottan. He also copied the Concert champêtre at the Louvre, and the Venus of Urbino. He worked through all of it as a student. Seven years later he painted Olympia, put a woman on a bed who looks straight out at the viewer, removed the mythology entirely, and Paris had to post guards in front of the canvas because people were going at it with umbrellas.

In every one of them bar Olympia, she is deeply asleep. Not dozing. Not disturbed. Not half woken by the man at the edge of the bed.

"And it was not a love song, it was something else"

The subject is Jupiter and Antiope. Ovid gives it two lines in the sixth book of the Metamorphoses, inside Arachne's tapestry of divine misbehaviour: Jupiter wanted Antiope, daughter of Nycteus of Thebes, and came to her disguised as a satyr. She bore twins who later built the walls of the city. That is the whole story. Finish and klaar.

Scholars have argued since the seventeenth century about whether Correggio's sleeper is Antiope or Venus, and Titian's own son, writing to Philip II about the picture, described it as the nude woman with the landscape and the satyr, naming nobody.

The last of these wonderful fauns is not a painting.

Mallarmé wrote the poem in 1876. Debussy set it in 1894 and opened with a single flute and nothing behind it, which Boulez said brought new breath to music, and he was right. Then in 1912 Nijinsky choreographed it and danced it himself, in profile the whole way through like a frieze, and for once the faun does the looking instead of being looked at.

He never touches a nymph. He gets a scarf. What he does with the scarf at the end caused a scandal in Paris and Rodin defended him in print.

Mythology aside what it is, is a woman asleep and a man looking at her. I have been looking at that print for days and putting myself on the bed.

That is what looking at paintings is for, and there is no point pretending otherwise.

She is Marie-Thérèse and she is also me, and the horned man kneeling there is not going anywhere.

More like surrendering to something And more like resting than running

These women are sleeping properly.

Correggio's woman has one arm thrown up over her head and her face turned away, entirely gone. Titian's is sprawled across the foreground with her weight fully down. Picasso's lies on her back with her mouth slightly open. They are all deeply, unguardedly asleep, in the way you only manage when there is nothing you are listening out for.

That was an artistic choice. The alternative was available and painters used it constantly. On and on and on with the violence. Lucretia mid-struggle. Danaë startled by gold. Proserpina with Pluto's fingers pressed into her thigh, which Bernini carved in marble so that you can see the flesh give. Any number of nudes caught glancing back over a shoulder at whoever has just come in. These painters wanted the other thing, and they took some trouble over it, and the result is that in a picture supposedly about a god's deception, the largest and best-lit thing on the canvas is a woman at rest.

And love was not what I thought it was

The faun is older than any of these paintings and he is not what they make him. He is also, and this gets left out of the polite accounts, enormous fun.

In Greece he is a satyr and he belongs to Dionysus. Horse-eared, snub-nosed, balding, permanently and comically erect, drawn that way on drinking cups for centuries without the least embarrassment. He dances. He is drunk. The satyr play came after the tragedies so that the city could laugh. And he almost never succeeds at anything, because the maenads beat him off with the thyrsos and everybody found this extremely funny.

The goat legs come from Pan, and Pan is worse. He chases. Syrinx runs from him until she is turned into reeds to escape him, and he cuts the reeds and makes the pipes, so the instrument is a woman who fled. Pitys becomes a pine getting away. We get the word panic from him.

So the creature kneeling by the bed was made. Somewhere between Ovid and Correggio the chase was taken out from behind him and the god was taken out from above him, one century at a time, until the titles stopped saying Jupiter and there was nothing left but the animal, holding a sheet, trying not to wake anyone.

And he adores her. That is the whole content of the picture. Put the faun next to the men I was raised to desire, marry and love and he loses on everything I was told to count.

More like an animal crawling deep into a cave Than a romance novel heroine being swept away

I keep thinking about how different this is from the men we are usually offered. Offered up in novels and media all the time. Jesus christ it's no wonder I'm a little dommey. I mean look at the options.

Every man I am handed comes with an apparatus. The pirate has the sea. The sheik has the desert. Rochester has the house and her wages and a wife upstairs. The rake has his reputation. Change the costume and the machinery underneath stays exactly where it is, which is between her and the door. It hasn't changed much today either. Today we have playboys who are still rakes, and handsome men with everything to offer and nothing to give. Ah now we're on to the bodice rippers, how little girls are misled

And the plot is always the same. He is dangerous, the danger is the appeal, she endures it, and in the final pages he turns out to have been misinformed, or betrayed by someone else first, or secretly a nobleman. The last fifty pages exist to go back over everything he did and make it retrospectively fine. The beast becomes a prince, which means the thing she actually loved is the thing she was made to give up. She loves them and they come back smaller. And she is made smaller.

Beauty is put in a house with a frightening man and told to stay. Her work is to keep looking at him until he is worth looking at. She does it, and he becomes a prince, and everyone treats this as a happy ending. It is not. She loses the thing she loved, and underneath it she is being told that a man's cruelty is a stage he is passing through and that she is the one who moves him along.

Rochester is the same arrangement (with some meandering over the moors and quite a bit of whining in it). He has a wife upstairs. She finds out, she leaves, and she is only permitted to have him after he has been blinded and burned, so the plot punishes him and she does not have to.

The rake is the version with better tailoring. Bored, faithless, requires reforming, and by the last page she has cured him of other women.

Every one of them arrives as one thing and turns out to be another, and the stories are built that way on purpose. The reader sits through fear and is paid in relief, and learns to call the relief love.

And all of them are being shaved. Which is odd. Not literally, though usually that as well. Something gets removed to make them acceptable, and her devotion does the removing. The Beast loses his fur. Rochester loses his sight. The rake loses his appetites. She loves them and they come back smaller. The faun has none of that. No ship, no fortune, no title, no name worth taking, nothing to withhold and nothing to ruin. He cannot follow anyone into a marriage. He owns nothing and commands nothing and could not keep her anywhere if he tried.

The hair is his hair. The legs are his legs. He has no toilette, no house with a locked room, no secret arriving in act three, no reform in progress. He wants what he wants and it is written all over him, permanently and fully visible and rather *coff * tumescent. Which is lovely.

The men in the novels keep theirs under management, and you know, they become a little rapey. Concealed, or threatened, or held back until she has earned it.

If you are with a faun it is because you want to be. And because you breathe easy and sleep easy.

"More like surrendering to something And more like resting than running"

I would feel safer with him.

Which I know is a peculiar thing to say about a man holding the corner of a sheet over a woman who is asleep. She has not agreed to anything.

But some men hide it, and they are dangerous because they hide it. Nice men, always self-proclaimed. Always. I'm a nice man. And suddenly I can't breathe anymore. Charming for six weeks or six years. Something underneath that you sense long before you can name, and by the time you can name it you have spent a year explaining it away. I want a good man.

Nobody has to work out what a faun is. He has horns and hooves and a body that announces itself, and no capacity whatsoever to present as anything else. There is no version of him you find out about later.

He is not harmless. of course not, he gives as good as he gets. The faun is animalistic, he is of nature and the natural world. You sleep in his grove on purpose and he comes to you in the night and tells you things. That is not the same as harmless. But he cannot ambush you, and there is a kind of rest in that which I did not expect to find in a print from 1936.

I am tired in a way that comes from holding my breath. Of breathing shallow breaths. Bad breaths, breaths that I thought were love, but were not. Tired from the ongoing labour of assessing a man's account of himself against what my own body is telling me, which is a job that exhausts the soul. All of it teaches the same lesson, which is that love announces itself as a racing heart and a shallow breath and years of proving. None of it mentions that a racing heart is what a body does around something it does not trust.

The faun requires none of it. He is kneeling in the dark being exactly what he is, and my pulse does absolutely nothing, and it has taken me a while to understand that this is what I want. Nothing about the faun raises my pulse. But by god, he feels like coming home. The long exhale.

Peace is coming

So I cannot tell you the faun is real.

I can tell you that the sleeping woman in the Picasso is Marie-Thérèse Walter, that in1936 their love affair was ending. And that I have been staring at the print for a god long while now. My heart rate drops when I do. I have not been able to say that about anything else for a long time.

So. The horned one. The hairy one. The goat man with the hooves and no ship and no title and nothing to hold me with, kneeling in the dark, taking care not to wake me. That's the thing about aquatint, (she said while casually looking for her way out of the rabbit hole) the plate takes what your hand did and keeps it. No tidying, no second thoughts, no better version at the varnishing stage. What went on is what comes off, and if you were clumsy then clumsy is what prints. Not perfect. Careful. And enough room to breathe.

And love was not what I thought it was

I now choose the goat man. Every fucking time.

(Peace is coming, peace is coming)

https://youtu.be/2naNoPmhUCo?si=cqx6G3EbHGzr0vb7