Emmie Writes

As I lay flat on the smooth surface of the table, I ask myself if the woman hovering above me knows who I am. 

I assume not, the man who painted me was far more famous even while I was alive. It’s not this woman’s fault that she doesn’t know me or who I am, I’m simply a footnote in the grand story of an even greater man. I’m sure she knows all his techniques, all his tricks. I’m sure as she gazes down at my tempera facade she doesn’t think about how long I sat in that studio while he posed me as he willed. 

I wonder if she knows the baby in my arms was not wanted. 

I wonder if she also has a child. 

Does she love the man who would give her a son? Does she see herself in the mirror gaze of her daughter? No matter how hard I looked in the faces of my children I only could see the face of my husband, and as much as I tried I couldn’t escape him. 

That is a distant life now, one I am not tethered to anymore. 

And I don’t know if I am grateful or horrified. 

I used to walk down to the pebbled shore of my coastal town, taking advantage of the privacy of the early morning. I would hike up my skirts and allow the chilled water of the Ligurian Sea lap over my feet, allowing the tide to take away my sorrow. My wrath. 

As the woman runs soaked cotton swabs over my face she lifts years of dirt and tobacco smoke and varnish that has long since yellowed. She washes me clean of my owner’s sins and fills them in with archival paints. I’m sure she knows that after my completion I hung in the office of my husband for nearly thirty years. A prominent merchant of the region, my husband spent every year of our marriage in that god forsaken office while I drifted away, tide by tide. Soon, all that remained of who I used to be had been washed away into the sea and yet my likeness still stood proud and stoic above him. 

Venus does not mean the goddess, not by artists and restorationists like one hanging above me with her precise and measured gaze. Venus is what they call women who will only be remembered for their beauty in the eyes of the artists who painted them. Venus is what they call women when they don’t care to remember their names. 

I am what he needed me to be, not what I was. 

If she knew my story would she be righteously indignant for me? Did she know that mine was the story of almost every other woman in her archive? Her nails are shortly clipped and manicured finely, just a coat of a pinkish varnish covering them, and if I could still feel with my skin I’d lean into her touch as she inspects the crevices in my impasto. The man who painted me was a student of Boticelli, a fact I’m sure she’s aware of. When in the presence of a piece of renaissance art one doesn’t turn their nose up. 

I am old. I am too old for a woman to ever be, but who could tell. His steadfast strokes ensured my lead pale skin would stay crisp forever, and perhaps that’s what I hate him for most of all. For naming me Venus, for taking away the one grace I was owed. To live and to die is a wonderful thing and I no longer possess wonderful things. I am simply a wonderful thing to possess. 

I watched for countless years as men hung me in their offices, their clubs. Choked by tobacco and the angel’s share I was nothing but an example, though I fear my next fate is the worst of all. They will most surely hang me in the whitest of museums with the whitest of lights shining down on me. I will never see the waves of my beloved again, they’re stalled behind me forever and I can never retreat. I wonder if men would be able to stare into the face of their enemy day in and day out. I did it for thirty years and then I did it for another six hundred. I have no choice but to do it for the next hundred. 

I am the Venus of Livorno, and I am tired.