"Ian Watson - The Coming of Vertumnus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

THE COMING OF VERTUMNUS
By Ian Watson

One of the most brilliant innovators to enter SF in many years, Ian Watson writes
fiction that is typified by its vivid and highly original conceptualization. He sold his
first story in 1969, and attracted widespread critical attention in l97l with his first
novel, The Embedding. His novel The Jonah Kit won the British Science Fiction
Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award in 1976 and 1977,
respectively. Watson’s other books include Alien Embassy, Miracle Visitors, The
Martian Inca, Under Heaven’s Bridge (coauthored with Michael Bishop),
Chekhov’s Journey, Deathhunter, The Gardens of Delight, Queenmagic,
Kingmagic, The Book of the River, The Book of the Stars, and The Book of Being,
the collections The Very Slow Time Machine, Sunstroke, slow Birds, and Evil
Water. As editor, his books include the anthologies Pictures at an Exhibition,
Changes (coedited with Michael Bishop), and Afterlives (coedited with Pamela
Sargent). His most recent books are the collec-tion Stalin’s Teardrops and the
novel The Flies of Memory. He has had stories in our First and Fifth Annual
Collections. Watson lives with his wife and daughter in a small village in
Northhamptonshire, England.

In the complex, suspenseful, and deliciously paranoid novella that follows,
Watson demonstrates, with typical ingenuity and inventiveness, that the best
conspiracies are those that go way back . . .

****

Do you know the Portrait of Jacopo Strada, which Titian painted in 1567 or so?

Bathed in golden light, this painting shows us a rich connoisseur displaying a
nude female statuette which is perhaps eighteen inches high. Oh yes, full-bearded
Signor Strada is prosperous—in his black velvet doublet, his cerise satin shirt, and
his ermine cloak. He holds that voluptuous little Venus well away from an unseen
spectator. He gazes at that spectator almost shiftily. Strada is exposing his Venus to
view, yet he’s also withholding her proprietorially so as to whet the appetite.

With her feet supported on his open right hand, and her back resting across
his left palm, the sculpted woman likewise leans away as if in complicity with Strada.
How carefully his fingers wrap around her. One finger eclipses a breast. Another
teases her neck. Not that her charms aren’t on display. Her hands are held high,
brushing her shoulders. Her big-navelled belly and mons veneris are on full show. A
slight crossing of her knees hints at a helpless, lascivious reticence.

She arouses the desire to acquire and to handle her, a yearning that is at once
an artistic and an erotic passion. Almost, she seems to be a homunculus—a tiny
woman bred within an alchemist’s vessel by the likes of a Paracel-sus, who had died
only some twenty-five years previously.

I chose this portrait of Jacopo Strada as the cover for my book, Aesthetic
Concupiscence. My first chapter was devoted to an analysis of the implications of
this particular painting . . .