ahpookishere | (no subject)

Art porn? (Another one of those 30 minute drabble things, in which I start having a heart attack circa minute 28. In all fairness, I was playing with concept for ~~several weeks, but I'm lazy~~ much longer.)

Please note, I am researchless. There no facts, here. I just make these things up as I go along. If you happen to know facts, please, correct me?

Sandro is sure he can feel the pigments at work on the skin of his nasal passages, the lining of his lungs. If they reach his bloodstream, they will dissolve his veins with their acidity. They will let the blood wash into his tissues, and then, it is possible that his body will physically reflect how he has been feeling all this time; empty, like a vessel for something unnameable, some outer force whose accidental patterns mirror the deliberateness of his mind.

The boy kisses the fold of skin where Sandro's thigh meets his pelvis, his head dipping forward so that hair brushes against Sandro's penis. It is auburn and worn long, which is the fashion among young men in Florence. This is also how Sandro has painted him. The first time in Madonna of the Pomegranate, to Maria's left, staring directly out at the viewer to obscure the distance between the earthly audience and the divine subject. Again now, for San Barnaba, although the expression has proven impossible to recapture, and the boy's likeness gazes blankly forward.

The boy has paint on his face. Cadmium red — a primitive, biological color. Perhaps he was playing in the workshop when Sandro disappeared to pour himself a cup of wine, disappointed by the day's work, the listless neutrality of the altarpiece. When he'd returned, the boy had pushed him down unto his stool, and sank between his knees. He does not seem aware of the splintered wooden floor beneath his legs. "It interests me, this process of yours," he says.

Sandro is hard already, from the wine, and the boy's genderless face, and the clumsiness of his hands. He is not yet accustomed to their size, or their strength. He smells like the centuries-old air of Florence, brown, heavy, food stalls, frankincense, ground turmeric — but his speech is eloquent enough. Sandro thinks for a moment, Where did I find you? and cannot remember. The flippancy with which he folds his back and kisses the head of Sandro's cock through his trousers, this betrays some finer breeding. The poor don't do anything this lightly; for free, at least. The boy pushes a hand beneath his hips, rearranging them. "Tell me how it is when you paint."

It is hard to interpret the question, with the stool pressing deeply into his pelvis and the boy's breath between his legs. This pattern is almost as maddening as sex itself. He doesn't understand (inhale) and he says so (exhale), then regrets it when the boy straightens up to clarify. "I don't mean, how you mix your pigments or choose your subjects," he says, and brings his hand up to his chin for a moment, considering. The gesture doesn't suit him. It is too old. Too imitated. "You know what I mean," he decides, finally. "Don't pretend that you don't. You talk, while I do this."

While I do this. It makes Sandro feel old. Makes him feel the posthumous grey moving into his skin. The weight of his debts. Monetary, and otherwise. The debt to the heart in his chest that cannot be repaid; it is wearing away in retaliation, growing smaller every day, trapping paint in the places where it once was hollow.

The windows in the studio are large, and the sun enters at a slope. The boy is bisected by light; illuminated only from the waist down. In the centuries before, his predecessors painted icons whose backgrounds were planes of gold pigment that drove them to madness and death. Sandro's backgrounds are blue, green, or a delicate ratio of the two. Lorenzo de'Medici praises the supernatural beauty of his Madonnas, his graces, but Sandro is of the world. Must be of the world, or else the pressure of the boy's hands on his legs wouldn't carry so much importance. The boy pinches the skin of his thighs, out of desire or tactile compulsiveness.

He should say something. There are a thousand monologues that would satisfy the boy's romanticism. Sandro is well practiced at them, anyway. He has his favorites; the frustration of only ever being able to suggest a thing, to illuminate it about the edges. He puts a hand into the boy's hair; there are more warm tones in it than he thought. "What is there to say. You choose your lines, your forms, your compositions. You spend lonely hours studying your light, your shadows, painting and repainting, like some complex game whose rules you've never studied. Finalize, finish, let your patrons visit and analyze and pretend they see a thing which could not be captured if you had a canvass the size of Florence, of Italy. Is this what you want?"

The boy nods, but his mouth does not leave Sandro's groin. An achievement. His tone is more objective as he continues. Better to be certain. Better to work down to the level of this character. "This city has one great communal ego that must be fed at all times. Our politics are the best. Our churches are the best. Our scholars are the most intelligent. Our artists can look into the world and perceive it in a certain way. Of all these things, this is the greatest lie. The artist feels nothing. The artist is detached, empty. The artist is only a filter. Life passes through, and select bits are caught, enlarged, detailed, imposed on a canvass."

The boy lifts his head. His mouth is wet and pink. Sandro thinks, I will have to rework his face. "Aristotle said it was Gods, or spirits. That used the artist's body to dictate their own message."

The shape of the shadow that collects in the crease of his eyelids, this thing seems important now. He pushes the boy's head down again, worried for a moment, but too aroused too care. The boy knows the Classics. The son of an aristocrat, maybe, but the kind who rejects his own wealth so long as it is convenient. Perhaps the kind of boy who goes to seek martyrdom in some war — not so much raging, as shuffling laboriously onwards — in the East. Perhaps the kind of boy who appreciates the careful decrepitude of Sandro's workshop.

"The Greeks thought the Gods were the legitimate owners of their art. Maybe this is true. Maybe men do not want to look at these things directly. They need an artist to provide them with imperfections, flawed anatomy, unfocused landscapes. To dispute the fidelity of human perception. Provide them with an acceptable fiction. "

He'll need a thinner brush to capture the starbursts of light on the boy's fingernails. This is what he's thinking as he orgasms, head tilted towards the pitched roof. A series of fine strokes. A suppressed moan that does not make it into the workshop. This is how artists plan their memories in advance. This pile of hours; these gently accumulating moments of interest.

Piece by piece, the studio retrieves Sandro with its gravity. The boy looks up, displeased. Perhaps from the taste of semen in his mouth, perhaps from Sandro's answers. He wipes his face with the sleeve of his tunic , then stands, alternating his weight between one foot and the other. One long, significant breath. It may indicate embarrassment.

"I'll wait outside," he says, and for a moment, Sandro regrets that he did not tell the boy how frightening it was to know that this brushstroke went there, this woman's face at this angle, this silhouette in the distance. He gropes for a towel, finds none, and sits instead, with the boy's saliva cooling on his penis. How it is to not know these things that you know. These things that don't belong to me, he thinks. These things that don't belong to anybody.