The Savage Garden. Mark Mills

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      Maybe Antonella was being polite, but she asked if he had any other insights he was willing to share with her. He should have confessed it was early days still, but the prospect of a leisurely stroll in her company overrode these thoughts.

      The amphitheatre that fell away down the slope behind them was not exclusive to Villa Docci, he explained, although it was narrower and more precipitous than the one in the Sacro Bosco, the Sacred Wood, at Bomarzo near Rome. Interestingly, Pier Francesco Orsini had also dedicated that garden to his deceased wife, Giulia Farnese, although the parallels stopped there. The memorial garden at Villa Docci was an exercise in restraint compared to the riotous imagination on display in the Sacro Bosco, with its mausolea, nymphaea, loggias and temples, and its stupefying array of bizarre creatures carved from solid rock: sirens, sphinxes, dragons, lions, a giant turtle, even an African war elephant holding a dead soldier in its trunk.

      The more temperate approach at Villa Docci was exemplified by the statue of Flora on the plinth near the top of the amphitheatre. The corkscrew pose, with the left leg bent and resting on a perch, was a traditional stance, typical of the mid to late sixteenth century – a form that had found its highest expression in the sculptures of Giambologna and Ammannati. In fact, as the file pointed out, the statue of Flora was closely modelled on Giambologna’s marble Venus in the Boboli Gardens in Florence, although like many of the imitations spawned by that masterpiece, it lacked the original’s grace and vitality.

      ‘I don’t know about the others,’ said Antonella as they circled beneath Flora, ‘but for me she is alive.’

      Her look challenged him to contest the assertion. When he didn’t, she added, ‘Touch her leg.’

      He wished she hadn’t said it. He also wished she hadn’t reached out and run her hand up the back of the marble calf from the heel to the crook of the knee, because it left him no choice but to follow suit.

      He tried to experience something – he wanted to experience something – and he did.

      ‘What do you feel?’ asked Antonella.

      ‘I feel,’ he replied, ‘like a sweaty Englishman molesting a naked statue in the presence of a complete stranger.’

      Antonella gave a sudden loud laugh, her hand shooting to her mouth.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Maybe you will see her differently with time.’

      ‘Maybe.’

      ‘Go on, please.’

      ‘Really?’

      ‘I come here every day if I can.’

      It wasn’t surprising, he continued, that the statue of Flora had been modelled on Venus, given the close link between the two goddesses. Both were associated with fertility and the season of spring. Indeed, it was quite possible that the goddess of love and the goddess of flowers appeared alongside each other in two of the most celebrated paintings to come out of the Renaissance: Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera and his Birth of Venus.

      ‘Really?’

      ‘It’s a new theory, very new’

      ‘Ah,’ said Antonella sceptically.

      ‘You’re right, it’s probably nothing,’ he shrugged, knowing full well that it wasn’t, not for her, not if she visited the garden as often as she claimed to.

      ‘Tell me anyway’

      There was no need to explain Flora’s story; it was in the file, which she had surely read. Her great-grandfather had even included the Latin lines from Ovid’s Fasti detailing how the nymph Chloris was pursued by Zephyrus, the west wind, who then violated her, atoning for this act by making her his wife and transforming her into Flora, mistress of all the flowers.

      No one disputed that Zephyrus and Chloris figured in Botticelli’s Primavera, but until now scholars had always read the figure standing to the left of them as the hora – the spirit – of springtime, scattering flowers. Hence the name of the painting.

      ‘But what if she’s really Flora?’ he asked.

      ‘After her transformation?’

      ‘Exactly.’

      ‘I don’t know. What if it is her?’

      The painting could then be read as an allegory for the nature of love. By pairing Flora – a product of lust, of Zephyrus’ passion – with the chaste figure of Venus, then maybe Botticelli was saying that true love is the union of both: passion tempered with chastity.

      It was possible to read the same buried message in the Birth of Venus. Zephyrus and Chloris were again present, suggesting that the female figure standing on the shore, holding out the cloak for Venus, might well be Flora.

      ‘And Venus again represents Chastity?’

      ‘Exactly Venus pudica.’

      She smiled when he adopted the well-known pose of Venus in her shell, modestly covering her nakedness.

      ‘It’s a good theory,’ she said.

      ‘You think?’

      ‘Yes. Because if it’s right then Flora is a symbol for the erotic, the sexual’

      ‘Yes, I suppose she is.’

      Antonella turned her gaze on Flora. ‘Do you see it now?’

      He looked up at the statue.

      ‘See the way she stands – her hips are turned away, but they are also…open, inviting. Her arm covers her breasts, but only just, like she doesn’t care too much. And her face, the eyes, the mouth. She is not un’inno-cente.’

      He could see what Antonella was driving at. Maybe he was wrong to have attributed the slight slackness of the pose to the inferior hand of a secondary sculptor. Maybe that sculptor hadn’t been striving for delicacy and poise, but for something looser, more sensual. No, that was wrong. He had somehow managed to achieve both – a demure quality coupled with an erotic charge.

      ‘So I’m not wrong?’

      ‘Huh?’ he said distractedly.

      ‘I’m not alone. You see it too.’

      ‘It’s possible.’

      ‘Possible? It is there or it isn’t,’ came the indignant reply.

      ‘You’re not wrong.’

      ‘Everyone else thinks I am. My grandmother thinks I imagine it, and this says very much about me.’

      ‘What does she think it says about you?’

      Even as the words left his mouth he realized it was an impertinent question, far too personal.

      ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ she replied, ‘because we are right and she is wrong.’

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