ABSTRACT
The flood recedes, the swamp is drained, and the excrement is lovingly conserved, and placed in a warm bath. It has two natures, a sulfurous male side and a silvery lunar side. The two find themselves together, sealed away from the outside world. The moist menstruum circulates around them. It is time for love. They fall on each other, they make love, and a child is born. As the heat continues, the child grows, he becomes sexually aware, he merges with his parents. Painting is also constituted by the vacillation: either it is a fully developed technique, replete with recipes, thick instructional volumes, and generations of accumulated wisdom, or else it is a trackless scene of perpetual isolated reinvention. In the late nineteenth century there were scholars in Germany and France who were especially well-informed and methodical in their attempts to recapture the forgotten methods of Venetian Renaissance painting.
